Accusations of “Fascism” - Confusing for American Voters

Wednesday 23 October 2024, by Dan La Botz

Fascism has now become a central issue in the U.S. presidential election largely as a result of recent statements by Donald Trump that he would use the military to suppress “the enemy within” made up of “radical left lunatics.” He is referring here to his rival Kamala Harris whom he has on several occasions called a “radical left lunatic.” He also named Democratic Party Congressman Adam Schiff, who led the first impeachment trial of Trump and is now a candidate for Senate as ‘the enemy within.”

Asked in a television interview if he thought the election process might be disrupted by outside agitators, he replied: “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics.” But, he added, “It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

Several commentators pointed out that using the military to repress one’s political opponents sure seems like what we call fascism. And to many no doubt using this power against U.S. citizens seems to go beyond Trump’s earlier statements that he would use police and national guards to round up immigrants and put them into concentration camps and deport them.

Also contributing to this discussion is a remark by General Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, that the former president was “fascist to the core,” as recounted in a new book by the famous American journalist Bob Woodward. Harris herself has quoted Milley’s statement and on other occasions agreed that Trump can be called a fascist. President Joe Biden had already called Trump’s movement “semi-fascist” back in 2022.

The claim that Trump is a fascist may not, however, move many American voters. The U.S. fight against Benito Mussolini’s fascists and Adolf Hitler’s Nazis in World War II is now ancient history. Only the 1 to 2% of Americans who are over 85 would have any first-hand memory of those events. Moreover, the American people have a notoriously vague knowledge of history and most have never given any thought to the question of fascism and what it means. For years among politicians and the press calling someone a fascist was seen as being in bad taste, while among the population in general calling someone a fascist just meant they were bad.

The situation is complicated too by the fact that Trump has routinely called Kamala Harris “a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.” Trump’s running mate, Senator J.D. Vance has stated that the Democrat’s claims that Trump is an authoritarian or a fascist have been responsible for the two assassination attempts against him.

The left has not always been helpful in clarifying fascism. In the 1960s and 70s, leftists tended to use the word indiscriminately: Southern racists were fascists, the Vietnam War was fascist, Chicago Mayor Daley was fascist, for some the entire American political system was fascist. For forty years after that the Communist Party and Maoist groups declared every presidential election that the Republican candidate was a fascist and that one had to vote Democrat.

Today, in groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose members tend to be college educated there is some discussion of fascism by academic leftists. Jacobin magazine, for example, ran an interview in 2019 with Enver Traverso about his book The New Faces of Fascism and his theory of “post-fascism” to explain people like Trump. In the far left’s small socialist and anarchist organizations, here are serious and practical discussions. And popular e-newspapers like Truthout have published many articles. Still, to most Americans, the word fascism clarifies nothing.

If Trump is elected, which is quite possible, and he proves to be the fascist we believe him to be, we will be both theoretically and practically unprepared.

P.S.

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United States (USA)

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• Biden-Harris Send More U.S. Arms and Troops to the Middle East
• Focus turns to Lebanon
• Harris and Trump Campaign Amidst Strikes and Protests

• Dan La Botz

  Dan La Botz was a founding member of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU). He is the author of Rank-and-File Rebellion: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (1991). He is also a co-editor of New Politics and editor of Mexican Labor News and Analysis.

International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.

Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Fearmongering Exposes Extent of Fascism’s Rise in 2024

By Henry A. Giroux

October 24, 2024

Source: Truthout



Stoked by vitriolic political rhetoric spread by the right and increasingly left unchallenged by leading Democratic politicians, the normalization of a hostile and violent attitude toward immigrants is spreading. Under such circumstances, democracy has reached a dangerous moment given the emergence of a violent politics emboldened by fantasies of racial cleansing and a national rebirth.

In a poll released on October 16, researchers at Marquette Law School found that, if presented with an unsympathetically worded question about whether immigrants without documentation should be deported, a full 58 percent of U.S. respondents are in favor of mass deportation.

Meanwhile, the punishing call for mass deportation of immigrants is amplified and reinforced through a combination of both bigoted anti-immigration bills and violence directed against immigrants in the streets. On the legislative front, the alarming rise of hostility toward immigrants is evident in the surge of anti-immigrant bills in various U.S. states, with 233 proposals introduced this year — a 77 percent increase from the year before.

These bills focus on enhancing border security, criminalizing the presence of undocumented people and limiting access to public services for undocumented individuals. As Pedro Camacho noted in The Latin Times, “These proposals, often targeting the estimated 11.2 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., frequently focus on Latino communities, which make up 66% of this population.”

One particularly cruel anti-immigration bill, passed in Texas in 2021, named Operation Lone Star, targets migrants for arrests on ludicrous misdemeanor charges such as trespassing. It gets worse. This three-year $11.2 billion program financed sending thousands of National Guard troops to the border while “installing razor wire along the Rio Grande.”

Anti-immigrant violence, erupting with brutal force on the streets of the U.S., has woven itself into the fabric of daily life, becoming an inescapable and relentless presence. More recently, for example, after former President Trump and J.D. Vance baselessly accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of stealing and eating pets, the city endured a wave of terror. This included bomb threats that forced elementary schools to close, coordinated swatting attacks designed to intimidate residents and targeted harassment campaigns that have increasingly focused on community events for queer and trans people.

Trump’s baseless claim that Aurora, Colorado, is “under violent attack” by Venezuelan gangs — a claim that has been directly refuted by local officials, including Aurora’s Republican mayor, Mike Coffman — is a dangerous escalation of his anti-immigrant rhetoric. This false narrative not only stokes fear and division but also has tangible, harmful impacts on vulnerable communities. As reported by Diane Carman in The Colorado Sun, many migrant families are feeling targeted and unsafe, with their children traumatized to the point of having nightmares​

This rhetoric amounts to a modern-day blood libel and form of state sanctioned terrorism against vulnerable groups, all the while giving Trump and his white supremacist and proto-Nazi allies a platform to vilify immigrants, people of color, and others they deem disposable. The resulting violence is amplified by white nationalist rhetoric, which spreads rapidly on social media, inciting further hostility and aggression against oppressed communities.

In recent years, particularly in the aftermath of the post-2008 financial crisis, amid the rise of Trump and the proto-fascist MAGA movement, along with an alarming increase in hate-filled far right media platforms, violence has ceased to be merely an instrument of political conflict; it has become politics itself. As Mary Kaldor once noted, the blurring of lines between violence and politics signals a profound shift in the way power is exercised in the contemporary world. This shift became starkly apparent following Donald Trump’s 2016 election. In the last eight years, he has employed divisive, dehumanizing and racist rhetoric that has emboldened white nationalist movements and reshaped the political landscape under the dark cloud of an impending fascist politics — even VP Harris refers to Trump as a fascist. Trump’s campaign and presidency normalized a toxic rhetoric that vilified immigrants, people of color, and other oppressed groups, creating a political climate where previously fringe and indefensible ideas found legitimacy in mainstream discourse. His racist statements — such as describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” “vermin” and “criminals” — expanded the threat of what might be called a politics of disposability. Moreover, his call for a Muslim ban acted as a dog whistle, signaling to proto-fascists, racists, and other far right groups that their dead language and hate-filled ideology had a champion in the White House.

The centrality of violence to contemporary politics could not be any clearer than Donald Trump’s calls for “one really violent day,” promoting police brutality as policy; his promise to defeat “the enemy from within” with “the national guard, or if really necessary, by the military”; his eugenicist rhetoric; and his promotion of racist lies about migrants committing crimes despite repeatedly refutation, while assuring attendees at his rallies that, if elected, “now we have to live with these animals, but not for long.”

Trump’s rise marked a turning point where political discourse and physical aggression intertwined. His presidency provided cover for vigilante actions, ranging from attacks on asylum seekers at the border to coordinated assaults on protestors and marginalized groups. Social media platforms became tools for spreading white nationalist propaganda, enabling coordinated harassment campaigns and radicalizing individuals at a pace previously unseen​.

This normalization of violence is intricately linked to the rise of gangster capitalism, a system in which corporate power, media manipulation and fascist ideologies converge to create a culture steeped in lies, hatred and the erosion of democratic values. Gangster capitalism is a new stage in the evolution of the market values dominating the organization of everyday life. Driven by an unyielding drive for power and profits, it no longer needs a legitimating narrative such as the promise of upward mobility and the sharing of wealth. It now aligns itself with the basic elements of an emerging fascism in the United States, claiming that whatever failures plague society — from climate disasters and staggering inequality to homelessness and mass shootings — are due to immigrants, the poor, Black people, women, trans people, and anyone else who doesn’t fit in the white Christian narrative about who counts as a citizen. At the heart of this global culture of violence is the concentrated power of a billionaire class that drives the arms industries, profits from war and embraces an eliminationist ethic that views militarism as the chief force for racial cleansing.

At the heart of this growing cultural shift is the rise of “culture war machines” — media platforms dominated by outlandish TV hosts and podcast personalities. These figures spread a toxic mix of misinformation and disinformation across social media, becoming the mouthpieces for a new politics of violence. They not only promote seditious ideas but also legitimize physical aggression against democratic institutions. They tread in lies, assume celebrity status and represent a new form of propaganda driven by social media that amounts to a form of digital fascism. Supporting this apparatus of violence are the defense industries and arms dealers, who profit from and actively sustain this ecosystem of fear and conflict. These corporate entities funnel resources into the militarization of public life, stoking paranoia and glorifying violence, while simultaneously benefiting from the erosion of civil society. The result is a confluence of media-driven violence, political extremism and profit, where the normalization of aggression is not only ideological but also a deeply entrenched economic enterprise.

These cultural war machines celebrate violence and insurrection as acts of patriotism, going so far as to bolster the possibility of a civil war if Trump loses the 2024 election. The January 6 Capitol riot is a chilling example of this dynamic. Donald Trump’s claims that the insurrectionists were patriotic Americans and that the event was merely a peaceful rally reflect the extent to which misinformation has been weaponized, violence normalized and apocalyptic fantasies spectacularized. These digi-fascist narratives are filled with lies, hate, racism and a virulent misogyny, and are amplified by far right media outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, and other reactionary media platforms whose ideological projects include redefining who counts as a legitimate American and attacking any viable element of civic culture. Their trademark, which filters into institutions such as schools and even the mainstream media, is an expanding pedagogy of repression, fear and what can be called ethicide — the death of social responsibility.

This normalization of violence is also underpinned by a racial component that structures contemporary war culture and its powerful pedagogical apparatuses, technological policies and political policies. Widespread sympathy for Ukrainians, largely because they are white, stands in stark contrast to the silence in many quarters surrounding the horror and unimaginable suffering inflicted by Israel on Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. The normalization of violence bleeds into the rhetoric of extermination. Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians signifies a dangerous convergence of power, technology and language that normalizes the unthinkable, unforgivable and indefensible. A stark example of this cruelty took place on September 17, when Israel’s used booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon and Syria, which detonated in grocery stores, houses and crowded squares inflicting horrific injuries on civilians, including on children who suffered severe, penetrating, traumatic wounds to their heads, bodies and limbs.

Sophia Goodfriend, writing in the London Review of Books, notes that “developments in algorithmic warfare have transformed Israeli military operations…. These operations, designed to catch the world’s attention, were the latest example of the deployment by Israel’s military and intelligence services of spectacular high-tech methods. They were intended to send the message that Israel is an omnipotent security state.” Such acts of violence demonstrate the terrifying reach of militarized technology, where algorithms and weaponry merge to inflict maximum harm with minimal accountability. The use of violence in this instance reeks of a brutality that has no limits and undermines even the logic of normalization, extending into the realm of the utterly indefensible.

War, in this context, becomes not only an outgrowth of the dreams of the powerful but also a mechanism for reinforcing racial hierarchies and global inequities. The selective empathy extended to white victims of violence reveals how deeply embedded racism is in the global war culture.

As Norman Solomon makes clear in his brilliant book, War Made Invisible, as the forces of gangster capitalism continue to erode democratic institutions, peace takes a backseat to the interests of the war industry. The munitions industry, war-hungry politicians and the capitalist class that profits from endless conflict have made war a central component of global politics. In the United States and other Western nations, the armed forces are revered, with military might and death machines enjoying celebrity status. The glorification of war and violence is not only normalized but celebrated, making it difficult to imagine a political system that prioritizes peace over profits. As David Cortright has observed, summing up an argument made by Andrew Bacevich, “The military industrial system remains ascendant regardless of who is in office or which political party has power. It consistently absorbs the largest share of national resources and technological capacity, and it is sustained by cultural myths that make the military the most trusted institution in American society and the arms budget practically impervious to challenge.”

C. Wright Mills, writing in the mid-20th century, anticipated the rise of what he called “observation posts”— institutions that, under the guise of education and media, serve to depoliticize the masses. In the 21st century, these observation posts have taken on new urgency as depots of pedagogical repression. Social media, far from being a tool of democratic engagement, has become a powerful instrument in the politics of denial. The far right cultural apparatuses, led by platforms like Fox News, amplify misinformation and perpetuate a narrative of violence and exclusion. Many journalists and writers fear that the culture of hysteria, bigotry and hate, fueled by these disimagination machines, will translate into voter suppression and the reelection of authoritarian figures like Trump.

In this image-based society, violence is reduced to an image-based spectacle, permeating the entire spectrum of cultural platforms, and reduced banal commentary by robotic stenographers pretending to be news analysts. Alarmingly, the seriousness of the threat of widespread violence in the U.S. is barely addressed in the corporate controlled media. Under such circumstances, as David Theo Goldberg notes, politics and war have become indistinguishable — and civil war is no longer the end of politics but its normalized expression. The Republican Party’s flirtation with the idea of civil war — as seen in Texas’s lawless disregard for federal immigration laws, Trump’s promise to pardon the Capitol rioters if reelected, and his repeated threats to punish and imprison his opponents if elected president in 2024 — demonstrates how violence is being woven into the fabric of everyday political life.

The rise of fascism, in this context, is not a sudden development but the product of a long historical arc. Fascism, as scholars like Alberto Toscano remind us, has deep roots in the history of the United States, from the legacy of slavery to the violence of the KKK, to the racial segregation of Jim Crow. This long shadow of racial fascism is being revived and reimagined under the conditions of neoliberalism, which exacerbates inequality, promotes racial hatred and fosters a contempt for social responsibility. The potential for fascism exists in every society, lying dormant until the conditions for its resurgence are ripe. Today, under gangster capitalism, the threat of fascism is particularly acute.

Jonathan Crary’s notion of “digi-fascism” encapsulates the role of digital platforms in the rise of fascist ideologies. Right-wing propaganda machines, alongside the power of transnational corporations and intelligence agencies, have created digital tools that serve the interests of a sociopathic billionaire elite. Such tools subordinate their potential benefit to the common good to a politics of repression, surveillance and consumer idiocy. These tools amplify violence and suppression, often transforming online rhetoric into real-world violence. Thomas Klikauer in his insightful comments on social media reveals the short path from digital violence to physical violence, a phenomenon seen in the increasing number of hate crimes and politically motivated attacks fueled by online radicalization.

In the age of digital demagoguery, censorship and repression of progressive voices have intensified, further entrenching the culture of violence. Critics of Israel’s war on Palestinians are now doxed, their images circulated on social media and fired from their jobs. Digital censorship reduces the readership of progressive platforms while promoting right-wing ideologies that trade in hatred and exclusion. Historical erasure, such as the banning of discussions about racial inequities, works to normalize systemic racism and depoliticize the masses. The power of manufactured ignorance, where deliberate lies hold more sway than truth, creates a collective psychosis that is difficult to dismantle. We live in an age marked by what Judy Estrin calls “authoritarian intelligence,” knowledge and institutions now mobilized to harness wealth for the financial elite and concentrate power in the hands of tech leaders, such as Elon Musk, eager to control society.

In this political climate, Barbara F. Walter’s concept of “ethicide” captures the moral decay of the far right — with its deliberate targeting of ethnic identities and its efforts to make political violence an organizing principle of politics. The Republican Party and other far right movements have removed ethical boundaries in pursuit of apocalyptic fantasies that justify violence and authoritarianism. The current political landscape, underpinned by the worst elements of gangster capitalism, mirrors the sordid history of fascism. While the echoes of slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK and 1930s Germany may not fit perfectly with Trump’s brand of authoritarianism, the parallels are alarming.

As neoliberalism continues to undermine democratic institutions, the need for critical education becomes more urgent. Theorists such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Robin D. G. Kelley, South African Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, and others provide a defense of the humanities, which offers a pathway out of the culture of violence by emphasizing the importance of critical literacy, the power of education as a practice of freedom and a crucial element of any viable democracy. However, the forces of gangster capitalism have little interest in fostering a critically literate citizenry or promoting the critical and democratic functions of education. Instead, they prioritize profit and power, leaving the humanities and the democratic values they uphold, in peril. How else to explain the worst elements of gangster capitalism: the scourge of inequality, a contempt for social responsibility, the promotion of racial hatred, a growing ecological catastrophe, an attack on the social state and public goods, and a corrupt alignment with the neofascist forces of MAGA, Trump and a Vichy-ridden Republican Party.

At this time in history, as the menacing cloud of fascism threatens to descend upon much of the world, it is crucial to understand that the normalization of violence and the rise of fascism in the age of gangster capitalism are deeply intertwined. As violence becomes the defining feature of political life, democratic institutions are eroded, and the space for critical inquiry shrinks. And the horror of possibility of the unthinkable: torture, war and death loom on the horizon. The war culture, fueled by racial hatred, munitions industries and corporate greed, thrives in this environment, leaving little room for peace or justice. Beyond the need for mass mobilization and collective resistance, a small measure of hope lies in reclaiming the power of education, particularly the humanities and liberal arts, to challenge the culture of violence and foster a critically literate and engaged citizenry willing to translate critical ideas into powerful acts of individual and collective resistance.


Henry A. Giroux
Henry Giroux (born 1943) is an internationally renowned writer and cultural critic, Professor Henry Giroux has authored, or co-authored over 65 books, written several hundred scholarly articles, delivered more than 250 public lectures, been a regular contributor to print, television, and radio news media outlets, and is one of the most cited Canadian academics working in any area of Humanities research. In 2002, he was named as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period in Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present as part of Routledge’s Key Guides Publication Series.

Liberal Interventionism From Past to Present

The kind of progressivism that people expect from the Democratic Party has been subsumed by another

By Brandan P. Buck

October 23, 2024

Source: Responsible Statecraft


Photo by Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“What’s happened to the Democrats? They used to be antiwar!” Such is one of the many questions being bandied about by an online commentariat seeking to make sense of a litany of Republican endorsements of Kamala Harris, many of them made by party elites known for their hawkish foreign policy like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

One could find similar consternation with American liberals’ support for U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. The confusion is based primarily on nostalgia, a selective view of history that obscures the Democratic Party’s longer, more complicated relationship with interventionism.

The reality is quite different: what we are witnessing is the latest iteration of an ongoing intraparty struggle where the dominant liberal interventionist core asserts itself over a smaller progressive noninterventionist periphery. While the latter often dominates popular conceptions of the Democratic Party and its vision for American foreign affairs, the former drives the reality of party politics.

This has been happening since the First World War, best encapsulated by the public debate between Columbia professor John Dewey and one of his students, writer Randolph Bourne. While both were considered liberals of a progressive stripe, they maintained opposing views on American entry into Europe’s conflagration.

Known for his adherence to philosophical pragmatism, Dewey asserted that the war could save the world from German militarism and be used to shepherd the American political economy toward a fairer, managed state. Bourne rejected this notion and argued that American entry into the war would undermine the egalitarianism of the larger progressive project and create a labyrinth of bureaucracies that would undermine democracy.

While Dewey’s arguments held sway as the United States entered the war, American involvement in Europe’s quarrel, compounded by civil rights abuses at home, proved Bourne posthumously correct.

Despite succumbing to the Spanish Flu in 1918, Bourne’s views of the war, bolstered by the posthumous publication of a collection of essays entitled Untimely Papers, found fertile soil in an American society horrified by the conflict. Chastened by the realities of the Western Front, interwar progressivism took on a solid strain of pacifism and opposition to centralized authority.

While Bourne’s sentiments survived the Great War and inspired a postwar mood of non-interventionism, they would not survive America’s subsequent entry into World War II, which set the tone for the foreign policy of American liberalism and, by extension, the Democratic Party for the next 30 years.

Liberal interventionism won out in the face of a threat posed by the distinctly right-wing geopolitical threat in the form of the Axis powers. Except for a few strident leftwing pacifists and a few dissident liberals who took refuge with the Republican Right, the bulk of the formerly pacifist left took up the cause of intervention in the name of antifascism.

The tone set by the Second World War carried through into American liberalism’s conduct of the Cold War. Beneath the din of anti-communism, one often amplified by conservatives, American foreign policy was shaped by a liberal understanding of recent history and the origins of communism. President Harry Truman’s eponymously titled doctrine entangled the United States in Europe’s security architecture.

After the Eisenhower administration, which solidified the Truman doctrine and expanded it to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Cold War framework was thickened further still by a liberal cold warrior, President John F. Kennedy.

Empowered by a materialist and universalistic view of human advancement and the belief that the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviets, JFK pursued a policy known as “flexible response” that expanded American military spending beyond the bounds of nuclear deterrence. These policy changes, maintained under his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, and coupled with a dramatic increase in foreign aid spending, expanded U.S. commitments throughout the postcolonial world.

This combination of asymmetric warfare and economic development drastically raised the stakes of the Cold War and led directly to U.S. entry into the quagmire of the Vietnam War.

Contrary to nostalgia present the Kennedy era as a missed path towards peace, in reality, JFK continued America on a path of war-making and militarization laid out by his predecessors and stretched well beyond the deaths of the slain Kennedy brothers.

While the Vietnam War was the product of Cold War liberalism, it was also its undoing. The horrors of the war, coupled with the inequities of the draft and government secrecy revealed, inspired a mass antiwar movement among the heretofore latent progressive left that found a resonant audience on Capitol Hill.

Earlier antiwar works from the left, including that of Randolph Bourne, were revived for a youth movement radicalized against the war. This movement similarly inspired subsequent debates during the late Cold War, particularly on the issue of the Reagan administration’s arming of the Contras in Nicaragua and intervention in the Angolan Civil War. The future seemed bright for a left-wing anti-war sensibility and its access to a Democratic Party that was amenable to its views.

However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, internal changes within the Democratic Party, and the subsequent birth of a new logic for humanitarian interventionism subsumed the ruptures caused by the Vietnam War. While the Democrats indeed offered notable resistance to Operation Desert Storm, often invoking the specter of Vietnam, congressional Democrats provided significant support to U.S. operations in Somalia and interventions in the former Yugoslavia.

During the Clinton administration, inspired by retrospectives on the Holocaust compounded by the Rwandan genocide, the notion of a “responsibility to protect,” the concept that the U.S. had the moral obligation to use force to prevent mass atrocity, took hold within elite liberal circles.

Due to these competing impulses, Democratic opposition to the Global War on Terror was checkered and paired by a left-wing anti-war movement that, in retrospect, was a shadow of its Vietnam-era self. While, as with Iraq War I, Democrats posted noticeable opposition to Iraq War II, such opposition was overshadowed by the fact that Democratic leadership, especially in the Senate, acquiesced to a war spearheaded by a Republican administration.

Three of the last five Democratic presidential nominees — then Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden — voted in support of using military action against Iraq. President Obama won in 2008 in part because he publicly opposed war in Iraq before it began and campaigned on ending that war. While he advanced that sentiment by pursuing diplomacy with Iran and opening up to Cuba, he also launched interventions into Libya, Syria, and Yemen, often sold on the grounds of a “responsibility to protect.”

Much like the liberal rationale of interventions past, American involvement was justified on humanitarian grounds and met largely with Democratic acquiescence in Congress and voter apathy.

Liberalism has entered a new wave of internal strife regarding America’s role in the world. In a new era of great power competition, the progressive base of the Democratic Party has come out hard against unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon. It has also shown varying degrees of opposition to U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. Yet, unlike the Vietnam era, this grassroots opposition has been unable to substantively influence Democratic politics, where a party elite clings to old views about upholding international norms and alliances, no matter how inconsistent or counterproductive those views in practice may be.

Given this intraparty divide, it should not be surprising that the Harris campaign has courted the endorsement of hawkish Republicans.

This history, however, should not be viewed as determinative of an inevitable path forward. The past has shown that these impulses are not static but held by individuals determined to shape the future.


Brandan P. Buck

Dr. Brandan P. Buck is a foreign policy research fellow at the Cato Institute and holds a Ph.D. in history from George Mason University. Brandan is a former intelligence professional who served in the United States Army and Virginia Army National Guard, completing multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Thesis on The Kosovo Crisis and the Crisis of Global Capitalism
(originally written May 1999, Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. to invade Afghanistan and Iraq for humanitarian purposes.)
http://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2005/01/war-whats-it-good-for-profit.html

The US Isn’t Moving Right — the Democrats Are

As the Kamala Harris campaign lurches rightward, pundits want us to believe she’s just following the will of the voters. The facts don’t bear that out.

By Branko Marcetic

October 23, 2024

Source: Jacobin



Some alarming news is brewing for the Left. It turns out that after a brief flirtation with progressive and socialist politics, the United States is now turning back to the right.

“Five years ago, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris catered to the social justice Left. Now she tells Oprah she’ll shoot intruders with her Glock. That’s what I call progress,” the American Enterprise Institute recently celebrated, pointing to Harris’s moves to “catch up” with a more conservative voting public. “Kamala Harris is running to the center-right because America is center-right,” National Review blared last month. Dave Weigel argues that Democrats have “adjusted to an electorate that’s shifted to the right” by making several major policy concessions “that they didn’t want to, or think they needed to, in 2016 and 2020.”

Don’t be so sure.

It’s not that there’s nothing to this. Immigration has become a more important issue to voters across the board, and far-right ideas like mass deportation, gutting the right to asylum, or simply curbing immigration now have support from majorities or pluralities of Americans, even leaping in popularity among Democrats. And polling shows that the public has lagged or moved the other way on topics related to transgender Americans, who the Right has been somewhat successful at turning into a wedge issue.

But it’s a mistake to treat the Democratic Party’s rightward lurch under Kamala Harris as an accurate measure of the country’s politics as a whole, or even to treat support for Donald Trump or Joe Biden and Harris as a proxy for ideology. (To be fair to Weigel, he takes care to take note this and other nuances.)

Take the issue of raising the federal minimum wage. Harris never talks about it: not at the debate with Trump, not in her first sit-down interview in August, not in the Univision town hall she just did. Though it might be part of the Democratic platform, for all intents and purposes, it has been dropped from her campaign and presidential agenda.

Does this mean the country has turned against a $15 or higher minimum wage, a major left-wing priority that was one of the Bernie Sanders campaign’s (and, later, Biden’s) flagship policies? Obviously not, as we can see not only from robust recent polling that shows the measure is wildly popular across party lines, but from the results of state and municipal ballot measures that have routinely seen Americans directly vote to hike the wage — including in deep red Florida, 60 percent of whose voting residents backed raising the wage to $15 four years ago, at the same time they elected Trump and a spree of Republicans downballot.

This isn’t the only such example. There are a host of progressive policies that poll well across the board that Harris either refuses to take up, like adding dental coverage to Medicare and lowering the program’s eligibility age, or doesn’t ever talk about, like a national rent cap. In a political system where both parties beg for money from corporations and the ultrarich, treating what policies those parties do and don’t support as a reflection of the will of the voters doesn’t make much sense.

Harris’s rightward lurch on foreign policy isn’t justified by meeting the electorate where it is either: polling consistently shows that voters, especially in swing states, are worried about the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East escalating, see preventing that escalation as a higher priority than total military victory, oppose Israel’s war and favor an arms embargo on it, and prefer the United States generally shrink its global footprint to focus on domestic problems.

These are all positions traditionally espoused by left-wing voices, and they’re also positions that Harris is on the opposite side on. Several of them are actually much closer to what the public has been (wrongly) told are the positions held by Trump, who is consistently trusted on foreign policy more than Harris.

In fact, the clearest and most consistent takeaways from election-related polling are not that voters think Harris is too far left and that Trump’s policy platform is what Americans want. It’s that voters are most concerned with the cost-of-living crisis that we’ve all taken to calling “inflation” as shorthand, that voters are drawn to Trump largely for this reason, that they want to hear more from Harris about what she would actually do as president to solve this, and that they don’t think she would break from President Joe Biden, whose years in power they associate (not unfairly) with feeling poorer.

At the same time, we’re only two years out from a midterm election in which Republicans, convinced that voters had turned against socially liberal views on abortion and LGBTQ rights, failed miserably to capitalize on an unpopular incumbent president by making what turned out to be an alienating conservative assault on both issues central to their identity. Even now, a left-populist candidate is within striking distance of beating a Republican for a Senate seat in Nebraska, a state that hasn’t voted blue since 1964 (yes, by taking a more conservative position on immigration, but also by running on a more liberal position on abortion).

Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign organization are not exactly acting like he’s running for president in a country that’s lurched rightward.

Trump has spent the bulk of this year running away from Project 2025, the deeply unpopular policy blueprint of radical right-wing ideas that members of his first administration devised in partnership with the Heritage Foundation, and which the campaign once proudly touted and has many overlaps with his official campaign documents. He’s renounced the GOP’s politically toxic stance on abortion, to the point of wrenching control of the platform-writing process and angering the party base with a more centrist position. The biggest takeaway from the vice-presidential debate was how Trump running mate J. D. Vance pretended to be someone else with a whole different set of beliefs.

That’s all before we get to the fact that, despite Trump’s resilience in the polls, his campaign has gone from consistently leading to being neck and neck in the popular vote, even trailing — and that Harris, in spite of running a far more conservative campaign, is not exactly running away with it either.

In fact, Trump’s resilience in the polls is in large part explained by the time he departed from right-wing economics.

Commentators have scratched their heads over why voters seem to have a nostalgia for Trump’s final, chaotic year as president in 2020. One obvious reason is that a Democratic-led Congress passed, and Trump signed into law, a hugely expensive welfare state expansion that, despite the hardship of the pandemic, was transformative for many people: income inequality narrowed on a historic scale, debts were paid off, money was saved, and many had the newfound financial security to find new, more rewarding, and lucrative careers.

Almost all of that expanded welfare state gradually disappeared under Biden.

Even on immigration, the issue voters have most dramatically moved rightward on, things aren’t as clear-cut as they might seem. Current public opinion on this hasn’t come out of a vacuum. Part of it has been a migrant crisis that is more and more visible to the average voter on their streets, and record arrivals at the border earlier in the year. But part of it is also a high-profile Democratic retreat on the issue, which has seen the party adopt a defensive crouch, abandon its Trump-era positive case for the benefits of immigration, and inadvertently elevate the issue by picking a high-profile fight over it instead of one over Trump and the GOP’s weaknesses (raising Social Security benefits, for instance). We can’t know how differently things would have looked after this path not taken. But it’s absurd and ahistorical to argue it would have had no effect.

So no, it is not really true that the country has lurched right, and certainly not that the rightward shifts we’ve seen are simply part of some organic process of the electorate coming to its senses. But we can say one thing for sure: the Democratic establishment is turning rightward, and it is determined to do so after a short-lived experimentation with mildly progressive governance under Biden. Whether Harris wins or loses in November, the result will be spun to argue there is no alternative.



Branko Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and a 2019-2020 Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting fellow. He is the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

A Planned Economy with No Central Planning Authority

By Tom WetzelOctober 24, 2024

Source: New Politics



In Democratic Economic Planning, Robin Hahnel says that his “most important contribution is” having “explained concretely how to reconcile comprehensive democratic planning” with worker autonomy and self-management. As Hahnel said in a Summer 2023 New Politics essay: “Early socialists, including Marx himself, were clear that instead of profit-hungry capitalists and the ‘anarchy’ of markets … the ‘associated producers’ should decide among themselves what to produce, how to produce it, and how to distribute it.”

The belief that a central planning authority was needed is rather a product of the early twentieth century, especially the Bolshevik project of concentrating planning control in a statist central planning authority. Hahnel says the key lesson from the failure of “real world” socialism in the twentieth century is this: No central planning authority is required! He puts the situation this way:

While early socialists championed conscious decision-making over impersonal coordination by markets, they did not propose a decider. Instead they proposed that the associated producers decide for, and among, themselves. And these are not the same thing at all (p. 294).

Democratic Economic Planning is a technical academic work and contains bits of mathematical economics I’m not qualified to judge. Nonetheless, most of his discussion is in reasonably accessible English. Anarchist and Marxist readers may be put off by Hahnel’s reliance on mainstream economics jargon, but this proposal for a socialist economy is worth making the effort to understand. There is no discussion of strategy for achieving a self-managed socialist economy here. As Hahnel says, this is a “description of the destination, not a flight plan.”

The Critique of Central Planning

At the time of the “socialist calculation debate” in the early twentieth century, anti-socialists assumed that a planned socialist economy requires a single “decider”—a central planning authority. Hahnel’s extensive study shows that this is a false assumption.

The anti-socialist case against central planning rested on two arguments. First, the amount of information needed for efficient allocation of resources was arguably too large for the central planning agency to marshal. According to Hahnel, the development of computer technology and mathematical programming techniques made this argument moot.

The second anti-socialist argument claimed that the central planning authority would be unable to make use of the “tacit knowledge” workers and managers in local facilities have from their skills and experience in doing production. In the Soviet Union central planners used a method called “material balances” as the basis for developing a plan. This relied on information about the actual techniques and resources used in the previous period. Hahnel points out that this method lacks dynamic efficiency because it can’t account for new technical possibilities that might increase efficiency.

To overcome the “tacit knowledge” problem, later advocates of central planning proposed iterative (back-and-forth) techniques to encourage local production units to reveal their real abilities. For example, local units could propose a plan based on maximizing their rate of return or based on a set of resources the central authority would make available. The hope was that the response by local units would reveal their production potential. Thus these would be learning techniques for the central planning agency.

Hahnel argues that a solution for this problem is unlikely under central planning for it would be dangerous for managers of local units to provide an accurate picture of their abilities. If they did, the central planning authority might then require the local units to work to their maximum ability. This would put managers at risk if a glitch led to failure. Thus the actual tendency under central planning is “a cat and mouse game” in which local managers hoard resources and hide their true capacity to ensure they can easily meet their assigned goals. He points out that large capitalist corporations also have this problem to some extent: in cases where divisional or plant managers do not provide fully truthful information to upper levels of the control apparatus.

Hahnel argues, however, that central planning’s main problem is that it is inherently incompatible with worker autonomy and self-management. Central planning, he says, is not simply some back-and-forth communication between the central authority and local units. On the contrary, the relationship is based on command by the central authority and subordination of local units to orders from above. Because the central authority needs to have local units do what it demands, they will also want to appoint managers to control the workforce. Thus in the Soviet Union, the thousand or so enterprises seized by workers and placed under control of worker assemblies and elected worker committees in 1917–1918 were almost entirely converted to control by a managerial bureaucracy appointed from above by 1920. It is easier to hold a single manager accountable to your orders rather than an entire worker collective. Similarly, managers of an industry or facility will tend to appoint supervisors or unit managers to control the workforce. In so doing this structure shapes mass consciousness because workers have no decision-making power. Mass apathy is the result.

W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell have recently argued for a democratic form of socialist economy in Towards a New Socialism (1993) and other writings. They propose that workers be remunerated in labor tokens according to the number of hours worked. Consumer goods would then be priced according to the number of worker hours it takes to produce them. This is roughly similar to Marx’s proposal in Critique of the Gotha Program. Cockshott and Cottrell concede, however, that work “intensity” also needs to be taken into account. So some workers would receive more remuneration per hour as they pack more work effort in a shorter time. Hahnel agrees with Cockshott and Contrell’s proposal for worker remuneration but argues their proposal for society-wide decisions for social planning is a form of central planning and is inconsistent with worker self-management. If everyone in the society makes decisions about production and workplaces, then a worker in a workplace has no more say than anyone else in the society.

Cockshott and Cottrell note that supply and demand for goods is never equal and thus “it is only average prices that should equal labor values.” Hahnel comments that to their credit Cockshott and Cottrell acknowledge that while this procedure will yield a production plan for private goods that consumers purchase with their labor tokens, it cannot decide how much public goods or capital goods to produce (p. 313).

Cockshott and Cottrell propose a popular referendum on the division of the social product between private consumption, public goods and services, and investment. Hahnel argues that this is inconsistent with a meaningful level of worker self-management. Any person in the society would have as much say as the workers in a particular facility over what they will produce and what inputs they will have to work with. If the referendum carries, then government officials would, as I explain in Overcoming Capitalism (AK Press, 2022), “assign inputs and output goals to the various production groups, which means that workers would be denied effective self-management over their work and workplaces.”

Hahnel also argues that the methods Cockshott and Cottrell propose will not lead to an efficient plan. Their proposal can only take account of the opportunity costs of using labor. But they have no way to accurately estimate environmental costs. Nor do they have a way to account for the opportunity costs of using existing means of production, which are a scarce good.

Hahnel’s Alternative

Hahnel’s alternative is based on the separation of planning into two decision-making channels. Through their neighborhood assemblies (“consumer councils”) the general population can participate in developing requests for both private consumption goods and public goods and services. And worker production organizations (“worker councils”) would develop their own plans for what they propose to produce. This is what I call the “dual governance” model. The earliest version of this was guild socialism (see G.D.H. Cole’s Guild Socialism Restated [1920]). But guild socialism had two serious flaws: (1) Prices were supposed to emerge from face-to-face negotiations between worker councils and councils representing neighborhoods or consumers of services, but there was no procedure to guarantee that prices would be accurate. (2) Moreover, since neighborhood assemblies and worker councils already required time from the participants, additional negotiating sessions between worker and consumer representatives would make further demands on everyone’s time.

Hahnel’s proposal avoids both of these problems. His model would include no negotiating sessions between worker and consumer representatives because each of the councils would develop its own “self-activity” plans. But how would they know these plans would be socially responsible?

Hahnel’s solution is a non-market price system. All organizations that develop plans would use a single society-wide price schedule that includes intermediate and finished goods, material resources, kinds of labor skill, and environmental costs. The price schedule is developed by a staff organization attached to the society-wide governance system. This staff organization then aggregates projected supply and projected demand from all the submitted plans and uses agreed-to pricing rules to generate the price schedule. But this is not a central planning authority. It issues no demands, targets, or plans. Nor does it “set” prices. Prices fall out of the plans the worker and consumer groups develop.

With no central planning authority, the consumer councils and worker councils have to use the price schedule to stay within budget. After all the entities have adjusted their plans, a new price schedule issues from the changed consumption and production proposals. The idea is that all the entities in the system of distributed planning are “adjusting” to each other. How many of these “rounds” of adjustment are needed to reach a viable plan? In Chapter 9 Hahnel discusses the computer simulations that have been developed to try to answer this question. Results so far indicate that a viable plan would require no more than five to eight rounds. Hahnel suggests that these rounds could occur during the month of December in order to set a plan for the coming year. But would people have the patience for eight rounds of tweaking their plans? I’m skeptical. If they decide to end at fewer rounds, more mid-year adjustments might then be required.

In Hahnel’s treatment of democratic social planning each type of planning will have its own time horizon. In their earlier writings about participatory planning, Hahnel and Michael Albert focus on the development of a production plan for the coming year. This is where planning by the local consumer councils and worker councils comes to the fore. In Democratic Economic Planning Hahnel also develops proposals for various forms of planning with a longer time horizon. The long-run planning for new equipment and capacity for production focuses on a time horizon of fewer than ten years. But other forms of planning have an even longer time horizon—planning for long-run environmental protection, development of the workforce skills that will be needed in coming years, and planning for infrastructure, such as a new subway line or bridge or other facilities that will be used for decades into the future. This is the first time that these long-range forms of planning have been integrated into a participatory planning framework. Hahnel also has a chapter on caring work or “social reproduction” labor. I believe this is the first time this has been added to the participatory planning framework.

How do we know if a production group’s plan is socially responsible? This will show in the year-end results. A production group does not own its means of production; it only has “user rights.” To maintain these rights the production group’s results must produce social benefit equal to, or greater than, the costs of production. If the benefit to cost ratio is less than one, there is a prima facie case for disbanding that group. In that case the worker federation for that industry might transfer the group’s resources to other production groups. However, this could be appealed. The industry federation might send a team to find out why the production group is failing. They might propose various solutions, such as investment in less polluting equipment, new training, or sending workers from that group to more successful groups for learning.

For Hahnel, planning activity takes place at different levels depending on how widely people are affected. Thus certain forms of planning will take place at a society-wide level, such as planning for transportation policy or universal provision of free-to-user health care. This is where certain society-wide institutions come into play, such as the National Federation of Consumer Councils, the industry federations, and the National Federation of Worker Councils. The planning at this level would occur through conventions of elected delegates. Hahnel points out that society-wide planning has to take place first, before local planning. A city population can’t make plans for roads or local health clinics without taking account of society-wide transportation and health plans.

The society-wide federations also play an important role for Hahnel in long-term planning and in issues such as planning for infrastructure that will be used for decades. The local consumer councils and worker councils come to the fore in the planning for production in the coming year. If more of the social product goes into investment in the coming year, then less is available for consumption. Hahnel thinks the consumer councils would be more likely to push for more of the social product going to consumption, while the worker councils and industry federations would press for investment in production capacity.

But planning for next year’s production cannot happen without first deciding the long-term investment in expanded production capacity, development of needed workforce education, environmental protection, and infrastructure. Thus Hahnel suggests the long-term investment planning might be carried out in November and then the plan for the coming year in December—taking into account the next year’s long-term investment requirements. In the long-term planning for infrastructure and production goods, the National Federation of Worker Councils and industry federations would estimate costs, and the National Federation of Consumer Councils would decide how desirable a proposal is. Staff organizations could provide expert advice. Scientists in a “Ministry of Environment,” for example, could monitor emissions or have expertise in environmental medicine.

A basic problem for long-run planning is that technologies, consumer preferences, and other conditions in the future are not now known. So planners will need to make intelligent guesses. The effectiveness of long-run plans, Hahnel explains, can be checked against results at the end of each year. Long-run plans can then be tweaked to adjust for mistaken projections.

In an appendix Hahnel evaluates a series of economic planning proposals—by Cockshott and Cottrell, Pat Devine, Dan Saros, and David Laibman. After detailing problems in these proposals, he critiques how Marxists think about prices: “To be perfectly blunt, we believe that proponents of different models of socialism who cling to their Marxist roots struggle mightily over the question of prices. . . . Sometimes their Marxist roots lead them to dismiss the importance of getting relative prices ‘right’ as a fetish of bourgeois economics” (p. 341). Hahnel argues that accurate quantitative estimates of opportunity costs of scarce resources, social costs of producing final goods, intermediate goods, produced means of production (“capital goods”), costs of emitting various pollutants, and social rates of return on investment are crucial for two reasons. First, without accurate estimates productive resources cannot be allocated efficiently. And, even more important, worker and consumer councils (and federations of these) need accurate estimates to plan effectively and in a timely manner. The “reluctance to surrender” to this need for accurate estimates of social costs, in his view, can create confusion and a lack of clear thinking. To this I will add that anarchists can also have this problem. In The Conquest of Bread, for example, Kropotkin vehemently tries to avoid anything that looks like a price system.

Getting Accurate Estimates of Pollution Damage

Some socialists have assumed that trained economists and scientists hired by the government can accurately calculate damages from polluting emissions. Hahnel says this is “naïve.” Clearly, he explains, “private enterprise and markets have long exerted a bias in favor of . . . activities that have negative external effects and against activities that generate positive external effects. The clearest example, which now threatens civilization as we know it, is the activities that emit greenhouse gases are favored because their negative effects go unaccounted for in market prices . . .” (p. 299). Although the problem of global warming requires international negotiation, Hahnel offers proposals to overcome environmental damage from emissions. These include long-term environmental planning and a “Pollution Damage Revealing Mechanism” (PDRM), which he sees as “most useful for local pollutants, pollutants whose effects are not lethal, and whose effects are relatively well understood.”

A key part of the PDRM is the formation of “Communities of Affected Parties” (CAPs) to deal with pollutants. He doesn’t say how these CAPs would be organized, but he thinks that the resident (“consumer”) councils could put them together. The National Federation of Consumer Councils could also play a key role in the demand and planning for environmental protection at the society-wide level—advised by a “Ministry of Environment.”

In his proposal the CAPs would be able to simply ban pollutants, meaning area residents would have a kind of property right over the ecological commons. The CAPs may also generate pollution permits for production groups, allowing some emissions of a certain pollutant. CAP members would receive credit for the damages suffered. This form of “sacrifice” would give the CAPs an increase in income. This is Hahnel’s way of implementing the “polluter pays” principle.

How does this lead to an accurate price for pollution damage? As follows. If the price schedule has a damage estimate for a pollutant that is too low, the CAP may not find it in its interest to issue a permit for as large an emission level as the production group requesting the permit wants. And thus in the current round of planning an excess demand over supply for the pollution permit would drive up the price in the next price schedule. If the proposed price for the permit is too high, the demand from production groups for the permit would drop. So as rounds of the annual planning process continue, the price for the pollutant will adjust so requests from the production groups for permission for a level of emissions will equal the permissions the CAPs are willing to grant. The price at that point is the “efficient” price because the estimate of damages will be roughly equal to the benefit from allowing that level of emissions.

Hahnel defines throughput as all the material resources used and the damaging emissions produced. He then defines environmental throughput efficiency as reducing the throughput per unit of output. A successful environmental strategy, he explains, is reduced to “kicking the can down the road.” This strategy works continuously to improve environmental throughput efficiency by substituting renewables for non-renewable resources, reducing the output of damaging emissions, and replacing scarce resources with resources that are less scarce. Says Hahnel: “Fortunately—contrary to what many in the degrowth movement believe—this process of ‘kicking the can down the road’ can be done while increasing economic well-being for far longer than humans care to worry about” (p. 263).

Thus Hahnel criticizes “degrowth” assumptions while throwing the gauntlet down to “ecomodernists” and “climate Leninists”—rejecting their assumption that statist central planning is needed for a solution to the environmental crisis.

From my point of view, a weakness of Hahnel’s overall proposal is that he avoids the question of the state, or what replaces the state. At one point he mentions the “national legislature,” but doesn’t explain what this is. I don’t see why the congresses of the National Federation of Consumer Councils and National Federation of Worker Councils could not form a bicameral legislature. But Hahnel does not discuss issues such as the police, courts, or military. Hahnel notes that in various revolutions in the twentieth century the tendency was for worker control of production to disappear after the initial revolutionary upsurge. This was true of both the Russian and Spanish revolutions. After the Communists wormed their way into control of sections of the police and army in the Spanish Republican state, they began to use these armed bodies to seize and nationalize worker-run industries, such as the arms, telephone, and motion picture industries. I think this is likely to be a problem if the workers do not gain direct, democratic control over the dominant armed power in society in the revolutionary period.

If we think about the outcome if a revolutionary era develops, different socialist ideas and proposals may become dominant in different regions or countries. Pieces of participatory economy might be used in different forms. Hahnel doesn’t really address the issue of variations in self-managed socialism across regions.

Hahnel’s proposal has similarities and differences to syndicalist proposals for economic planning and governance, such as After the Revolution (1935) by Diego Abad de Santillan or the program in Rudolf Rocker’s Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice. A basic issue is, What ensures the worker self-managed industries act in a socially accountable way? De Santillan proposed that all industries would be run by worker-controlled industry federations that would be united into regional and federal worker congresses, which he called “Councils of Economy.” He suggested that “the federal council would act as a social counterweight, which, in case of need, would restrict the corporative trade unionism [that] might manifest itself to excess” (p. 83). This is an example of what Hahnel calls “the one big meeting” approach to social planning. I tend to agree with Hahnel that a separate community sphere of decision-making is necessary to ensure socially responsible action on the part of workplace groups—through the community-based planning of requests for provision of goods and services, monitoring product quality, and ensuring protection of the environment against damaging pollutants. Thus we can have both self-management of decision-making in communities and in workplaces.




Tom Wetzel

In Deer Hunting With Jesus Joe Bageant says "those who grow up in the lower class in America often end up class conscious for life" and so it has been with me.After leaving high school I worked as a gas station attendant for quite a few years and got let go from that job in one of the first job actions I was involved in. I gradually worked my way through college and in the early '70s was part of an initial group who organized the first teaching assistants' union at UCLA in which I was a shop steward. I had been involved in the anti-war movement in the late '60s and first became involved in socialist politics at that time.After obtaining a PhD at UCLA I was an assistant professor for several years at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee where I taught logic and philosophy and in my spare time helped to produce a quarterly anarcho-syndicalist community newspaper. After I returned to California in the early '80s, I worked for a number of years as a typesetter and was involved in an attempt to unionize a weekly newspaper in San Francisco. For about nine years I was the volunteer editorial coordinator for the anarcho-syndicalist magazine ideas & action and wrote numerous essays for that publication. Since the '80s I've made my living mainly as a hardware and software technical writer in the computer industry. I've occasionally taught logic classes as a part-time adjunct.During the past decade my political activity has mainly been focused on housing, land-use and public transit politics. I did community organizing at the time of the big eviction epidemic in my neighborhood in 1999-2000, working with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. Some of us involved in that effort then decided on a strategy of gaining control of land and buildings by helping existing tenants convert their buildings to limited equity housing cooperatives. To do this we built the San Francisco Community Land Trust of which I was president for two years.