AUSTRALIA

More than 1m birds to be destroyed as bird flu detected at a seventh Victorian farm

By Jane McNaughton and Warwick Long for ABC Rural


Victoria's chief veterinary officer, Graeme Cooke, said the latest infected farm housed between 150,000 and 200,000 egg-laying chickens. (File pic) Photo: AFP

Australia's largest outbreak of bird flu has hit a grim milestone, with Victorian authorities confirming more than 1 million birds will be killed to try and prevent the spread of the virus.

Seven farms across south-west Victoria have now been found with highly pathogenic strains of avian influenza, affecting hundreds of thousands of farmed birds.

The outbreak began on an egg farm near Meredith in May, and has continued to spread in the region as local farmers face the harsh reality of Australia's biosecurity response to outbreaks of emergency animal diseases.

Victoria's chief veterinary officer, Graeme Cooke, said the latest infected farm housed between 150,000 and 200,000 egg-laying chickens.

"This latest infected premises was once again picked up on very early surveillance and that means it can be dealt with very early," Dr Cooke said.

"I really thank producers within the restricted area where all the cases have been for their help and collaboration as we work our way through this outbreak."
Nation's largest outbreak

The death toll from the current outbreak of bird flu is more than double the state's most recent outbreak in 2020, which resulted in the death of over 400,000 birds, including emus, turkeys and chickens, across the state.

The current outbreak is concentrated mostly to the Golden Plains Shire, one of the largest regions that produces eggs and chicken meat in Victoria, producing about a quarter of Victoria's eggs.

A control zone is in place spanning approximately 100 kilometres from west to east across the region, covering six of the seven farms detected with the H7N3 strain of avian influenza.

"[Control measures] really reduce the level of virus in an area. The faster we can pick it up, the less risk there is of onwards spread," Dr Cooke said.

"The requirements in the controlled areas, especially the restricted areas, are to prevent onward movement of the virus either by vehicles, people or other means.

"Meredith has consistently been detecting [bird flu].

"If this virus was allowed to spread onward it would be devastating for the rest of the poultry industry in Victoria and perhaps onward through Australia.

"The right thing to do is to stop the infected premises being any further risk, and that's the action that is taken through the humane destruction and disposal and the onwards cleansing and disinfection of the farms."

An egg farm near Terang was also found to have bird flu within its chicken population last month, however authorities found a different strain, H7N9.

Agriculture Victoria is investigating the cause of the outbreaks but so far it is believed the disease has spread from wild birds into domestic poultry.

The disease has spread from wild birds into domestic poultry, experts believe. (File pic) Photo: Pixabay
Duck farm infected

The state's outbreak of avian influenza has also spread to a commercial duck farm near Meredith.

Australian Duck Meat Association chief executive Greg Parkinson said the farm represented about two percent of Australia's commercial duck population and mostly supplied meat to restaurants, not supermarkets.

"It was not unexpected, it's a smallish duck farm - about 40,000 birds - and it was very close to the infected egg farms," he said.

"Ducks are kept in sheds precisely for these sorts of reasons - we try to buffer ourselves from wild bird incursions and virus spillovers.

"About 30 million ducks are processed for meat per year."

Australia's duck meat industry is relatively concentrated and run by two main processors, Luv-a-Duck, which has about 30 farms in western Victoria, and Pepe's Ducks which runs out of New South Wales.

The infected duck farm does not supply either of these companies.
International infections

There are many types of bird flu, including the highly pathogenic H5N1 strain, which has been detected in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, North America, South America and Antarctica.

This strain of the disease has spread beyond poultry, affecting various mammals including penguins, cattle and humans.

This strain has not been detected in Australian animals, however, the nation recorded its first ever human case in March, when a child returned home from India with the disease.

The child has since recovered and authorities have confirmed there is no ongoing threat to the public.

Australia's response to eradicate avian influenza is in stark contrast to countries like the United States, where more than 96 million birds have been affected by the disease since an outbreak that began in 2022, according to the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

This story was first published by the ABC.

The Specter of Neo-Fascism Is Haunting Europe

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Jun 18, 2024

With mainstream parties and politicians already preparing to accommodate the far right following this month's European Parliament election, the axiom of post-World War II European democracy has been quietly abandoned. “No collaboration with fascists" is being replaced by a tacit acceptance of them.

LJUBLJANA – The surprise in this month’s European Parliament elections was that the outcome everyone expected really did come to pass. To paraphrase a classic scene from the Marx Brothers: Europe may be talking and acting like it is moving to the radical right, but don’t let that fool you; Europe really is moving to the radical right.

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Why should we insist on this interpretation? Because most of the mainstream media has sought to downplay it. The message we keep hearing is: “Sure, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) occasionally flirt with fascist motifs, but there is no reason to panic, because they still respect democratic rules and institutions once in power.” Yet this domestication of the radical right should trouble us all, because it signals a readiness by traditional conservative parties to go along with the new movement. The axiom of post-World War II European democracy, “No collaboration with fascists,” has been quietly abandoned.

The message of this election is clear. The political divide in most EU countries is no longer between the moderate right and the moderate left, but between the conventional right, embodied by the big winner, the European People’s Party (comprising Christian democrats, liberal-conservatives, and traditional conservatives) and the neo-fascist right represented by Le Pen, Meloni, AfD, and others.

The question now is whether the EPP will collaborate with neo-fascists. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is spinning the outcome as a triumph of the EPP against both “extremes,” yet the new parliament will include no left-wing parties whose extremism is even distantly comparable to that of the far right. Such a “balanced” view from the EU’s top official sends an ominous signal.

When we talk about fascism today, we should not confine ourselves to the developed West. A similar kind of politics has been ascendant in much of the Global South as well. In his study of China’s development, the Italian Marxist historian Domenico Losurdo (also known for his rehabilitation of Stalin) stresses the distinction between economic and political power. In pursuing his “reforms,” Deng Xiaoping knew that elements of capitalism are necessary to unleash a society’s productive forces; but he insisted that political power should remain firmly in the hands of the Communist Party of China (as the self-proclaimed representative of the workers and farmers).

This approach has deep historical roots. For over a century, China has embraced the “pan-Asianism” that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century as a reaction against Western imperialist domination and exploitation. As historian Viren Murthy explains, this project has always been driven by a rejection not of Western capitalism, but of Western liberal individualism and imperialism. By drawing on pre-modern traditions and institutions, pan-Asianists argued, Asian societies could organize their own modernization to achieve even greater dynamism than the West.

While Hegel himself saw Asia as a domain of rigid order that does not allow for individualism (free subjectivity), pan-Asianists proposed a new Hegelian conceptual framework. Since the freedom offered by Western individualism ultimately negates order and leads to social disintegration, they argued, the only way to preserve freedom is to channel it into a new collective agency.

One early example of this model can be found in Japan’s militarization and colonialist expansion before WWII. But historical lessons are soon forgotten. In the search for solutions to big problems, many in the West could be newly attracted to the Asian model of subsuming individualistic drives and the longing for meaning in a collective project.

Pan-Asianism tended to oscillate between its socialist and fascist versions (with the line between the two not always clear), reminding us that “anti-imperialism” is not as innocent as it may appear. In the first half of the twentieth century, Japanese and German fascists regularly presented themselves as defenders against American, British, and French imperialism, and one now finds far-right nationalist politicians taking similar positions vis-à-vis the European Union.

The same tendency is discernible in post-Deng China, which political scientist A. James Gregor classifies as “a variant of contemporary fascism”: a capitalist economy controlled and regulated by an authoritarian state whose legitimacy is framed in the terms of ethnic tradition and national heritage. That is why Chinese President Xi Jinping makes a point of referring to China’s long, continuous history stretching back to antiquity. Harnessing economic impulses for the sake of nationalistic projects is the very definition of fascism, and similar political dynamics can also be found in India, Russia, Turkey, and other countries.

It is not hard to see why this model has gained traction. While the Soviet Union suffered a chaotic disintegration, the CPC pursued economic liberalization but still maintained tight control. Thus, leftists who are sympathetic toward China praise it for keeping capital subordinated, in contrast to the US and European systems, where capital reigns supreme.

But the new fascism is also supported by more recent trends. Beyond Le Pen, another big winner of the European elections is Fidias Panayiotou, a Cypriot YouTube personality who previously gained attention for his efforts to hug Elon Musk. While waiting outside Twitter’s headquarters for his target, he encouraged his followers to “spam” Musk’s mother with his request. Eventually, Musk did meet and hug Panayiotou, who went on to announce his candidacy to the European Parliament. Running on an anti-partisan platform, he won 19.4% of the popular vote and secured himself a seat.

Similar figures have also cropped up in France, the United Kingdom, Slovenia, and elsewhere, all justifying their candidacies with the “leftist” argument that since democratic politics has become a joke, clowns might as well run for office. This is a dangerous game. If enough people despair of emancipatory politics and accept the withdrawal into buffoonery, the political space for neo-fascism widens.

Reclaiming that space requires serious, authentic action. For all my disagreements with French President Emmanuel Macron, I think he was correct to respond to the French far right’s victory by dissolving the National Assembly and calling for new legislative elections. His announcement caught almost everyone off guard, and it is certainly risky. But it is a risk worth taking. Even if Le Pen wins and decides who will be the next prime minister, Macron, as president, will retain the ability to mobilize a new majority against the government. We must take the fight to the new fascism as forcefully and as fast as possible.

THUMBNAIL LE PEN  Horacio Villalobos/Corbis/Getty Images


SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
Writing for PS since 2022
33 Commentaries
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Slavoj Žižek, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, is International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and the author, most recently, of Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).

 

Killing of 2 Cattle Transport Workers ‘Premeditated’: AIKS Accuses Chhattisgarh Police of Bias

Newsclick Report | 11 Jun 2024

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The farmers’ body demanded that the NDA government enact a law to prevent mob lynching and hate crimes in the name of cow protection.

New Delhi: The All-India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) has condemned the brutal killing of two cattle transport workers and injuring of another on the Mahasamund-Raipur border in Chhattisgarh last week (June 7), ostensibly in the name of cow protection.

Alleging that the attack was “premeditated”, the farmers’ body said a group of 15-20 people had been tailing the truck carrying cattle toward Odisha and had “put nails on the bridge to deflate the tyres”.

“Tehseen Qureshi died on the spot and Chand Khan was declared dead after reaching the hospital. Another worker Saddam Qureshi suffered severe injuries and is in hospital. It is very clear that this is an incident of premeditated murder and a hate crime, and not a mob lynching,” AIKS said in a statement. The workers were from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh,

The farmers’ body accused the Chhattisgarh Police of “communal bias in registering the FIR avoiding Section 302 of IPC in the dreadful incident of brutal murder of two transport workers.”

AIKS demanded a judicial enquiry, immediate arrest of culprits and prosecution, compensation of Rs 50 lakh each to the families of the deceased and Rs 20 lakh for the injured.

It also demanded that the newly sworn in NDA government at the Centre enact a law to prevent mob lynching and hate crimes.

 

Read the full statement below:

 Press Statement by AIKS

*AIKS accuses State Police of Chhattisgarh of Communal Bias* 

*Demands Judicial Enquiry, Immediate Arrest of the Culprits and Prosecution, Compensation of Rs 50 Lakh each to the Families of the Deceased and Rs 20 Lakh to the Injured* 

*Demands that Parliament Enact a Law to Prevent Mob Lynching and Hate Crimes and Establish Fast Track Court for Speedy Trial and Conviction*  

AIKS has strongly protested the brutal murder of two cattle transport workers and the severe injury to another worker between 2 and 3 am on 7th June 2024 on the Mahanadi Bridge, in the Mahasamund–Raipur Border, Chhattisgarh, by criminal gangsters. The culprits – a group of 15-20 people – had been following the truck load of animals travelling towards Odisha, put nails on the bridge to deflate the tyres and after stopping the truck, the drivers were attacked, beaten severely and thrown to the rocks 30 feet below the bridge. Tehseen Qureshi died on the spot and Chand Khan was declared dead after reaching the hospital. Another worker Saddam Qureshi suffered severe injuries and is in hospital. It is very clear that this is an incident of premeditated murder and a hate crime, and not a mob lynching.  

However, as per the State Police, the FIR has been registered under Section 304 and 307 of IPC for attempt to murder and culpable homicide that attracts punishment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with a fine, or with both. There is no Section 302 of IPC for murder. The police justify this serious omission as suspected mob lynching in the name of cow protection.

AIKS strongly condemns the Chhattisgarh State Police for its rabidly communal bias in registering the FIR avoiding Section 302 of IPC in the dreadful incident of brutal murder of two transport workers. AIKS demands that the Deputy Chief Minister Vijay Sharma in charge of the Home Portfolio ensure rule of law in the state of Chhattisgarh, take strong action against the top police officers involved in the conspiracy to protect the murderers, immediate arrest of all the criminals and ensure unbiased prosecution. AIKS strongly demands a judicial enquiry into the incident, including the role of the police in protecting the criminals.

Though the workers are from Saharanpur of Uttar Pradesh, the BJP-led state government also is silent, without making any intervention to ensure justice to the hapless families of the murdered workers. AIKS condemns the callous attitude of the BJP-led state governments of both the states and demands compensation of Rs 50 lakh each to the family of both deceased workers and Rs 20 lakh to the severely injured worker.

Most of the political parties of Chhattisgarh are so far silent on the brutal murder and the callous attitude of the state government. This is highly unfortunate. The Chhattisgarh Kisan Sabha and other Kisan organisations have strongly condemned the murder.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

The cattle economy is a part of agriculture contributing 27% of the income of farmer households. India is the second largest country in beef export. The attack on cattle traders and workers affects the cattle trade and farmers are unable to sell their animals and get remunerative prices.

AIKS strongly demands the NDA-led Union Government and the newly elected Parliament to enact a law to prevent mob lynching and hate crimes in the name of cow protection, to establish fast track courts to expedite trial and conviction in order to protect the interests of the cattle farmers, traders and workers in the Industry. 

Ashok Dhawale, President                        

Vijoo Krishnan, General Secretary

Trumpism, fascism, and political realities in the United States

Paul Le Blanc
11 June, 2024


First published at Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.


Donald Trump represents a kind of politics that has powerfully transformed political realities in the United States, a kind of politics labeled by some as Trumpism. This useful label helps us understand that regardless of what happens to Donald Trump – whether he finally goes to prison or once again takes command of the U.S. Presidency, whether he lives for another decade or dies tomorrow – Trumpism will be with us for a long time. Before examining Trumpism, let us pause to consider the person with whose name this “ism” is identified.

One approach to this task might involve working our way through the alphabet. Beginning with the letter “a” – and setting aside rude and insulting expletives – we come upon the word “arrogant,” which certainly fits, although this quality is, sadly, not unique to Trump.

The qualities of Donald Trump certainly include dynamics reflecting The Three Bs – bigot, bully, and braggart. His bigotry reflects deep currents within the culture, the attitudes, and the psychological make-up of millions of people in the United States. He has shown that, when it suits him, he can assume a bullying stance and tone, whipping many into submission – intimidating some, delighting others. The bragging takes many forms: a “go-getter” who compulsively highlights his achievements but also claims to have gone further and gotten more than is actually the case; an ignorant man who glorifies his ignorance (“I don’t read books!”) while claiming to know far more than he knows; someone who exaggerates the esteem in which people hold him and takes credit for accomplishments that are not his own. One should add a fourth “b” – billionaire, adding luster and resources and authority to all that is involved in the narcissistic self-construction of the person who is Donald Trump.

Starting with the next letter of the alphabet, we can note that Trump is quintessentially, and very proudly, a capitalist, and there are thirty-four felony convictions which cause many to label him a crook.
Trump and Trumpism

Jumping ahead to another letter in the alphabet, there are many who insist that he is a fascist. Others question whether he is consistent and coherent enough to play the role of a Mussolini or a Hitler, insisting that the term is not useful in defining Trump. Some add that the term “fascist” has largely become a meaningless epithet – a freely-used insult applied to ideas and practices and people we find oppressive. Trump himself uses it (jumbling it with such words as “Marxists” and “Communists” and “terrorists” and “very bad people”) to denounce enemies lurking in the courtroom, in the mainstream news media, in the government, and in the Democratic Party.

How disciplined and single-minded is Trump as a political leader? He could hardly be compared favorably to a Churchill or a Reagan, let alone to a Mussolini or a Hitler. “By the spring of 2020,” according to New York Times chronicler Maggie Haberman, “it had become clear to many of his top advisors that Trump’s impulse to undermine existing systems and bend institutions to suit his purposes was accompanied by erratic behavior and levels of anger requiring others to try to keep him on track nearly every hour of the day.”1

It is instructive to consider the experience of Steve Bannon, one of the most focused far-right ideologues serving as a central advisor in the early phase of the Trump administration, as reported by Michael Wolff:


Part of Bannon’s authority in the new White House was as keeper of the Trump promises, meticulously logged onto the white board in his office. Some of these promises Trump enthusiastically remembered making, others he had little memory of, but was happy to accept that he had said it. Bannon acted as disciple and promoted Trump to guru – or inscrutable God.2

Over time, Bannon would become exasperated and disillusioned, realizing that the details of the right-wing “populist” agenda he envisioned “were entirely captive to Trump’s inattention and wild mood swings. Trump, Bannon had long ago learned, ‘doesn’t give a fuck about the agenda – he doesn’t know what the agenda is.’”3

One is struck by reports from Trump’s so-called press conference of May 31, 2024, after his felony convictions. Far from a defiant right-wing or fascist clarion call, “the thing was kind of a slog,” according to A.O. Scott of the New York Times. Scott adds: “Mr. Trump has never been an orderly orator or a methodical builder of arguments; he riffs and extemporizes, free-associates and repeats himself, straying from whatever script may be at hand.” Scott reports that “his manner was subdued” and “curiously flat: a rehash of the trial, with a few gestures toward the larger political stakes.” Rex Huppke of USA Today was less charitable, describing it as “a rambling, incoherent mess,” with Trump claiming that witnesses in his trial were “literally crucified,” that President Joe Biden wants to “stop you from having cars,” and that the judge who will sentence him on July 11 is “really a devil.” Hafiz Rashid of the New Republic commented: “At times, his words were hard to follow, as the first convicted felon former president went off on tangents with sentences with no clear end.”4

But what can be termed Trumpism transcends the personal limitations and dysfunctionality of this aging individual. Three essential elements hold together this broad entity that we are labelling Trumpism.

One element is armed and dangerous – the forces that came together to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, which included the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, some of the more militant components of the Tea Party movement, latter-day partisans of the old Southern Confederacy, various Nazi and white supremacist groups. U.S. General Mark Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, listed the groups in a January 2021 notebook, with the comment, “Big Threat: domestic terrorism.” According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa: “Some were the new Brown Shirts, a U.S. version, Milley concluded, of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party that supported Hitler. It was a planned revolution. Steve Bannon’s vision coming to life. Bring it all down, blow it up, burn it, and emerge with power.” These once-marginalized elements had come into the political mainstream, and had grown substantially, with the active encouragement of Donald Trump and others around him. But this cunning, avaricious, profoundly limited individual and his acolytes were hardly capable of controlling them.5

A second element essential to Trumpism’s make-up can be found in a quite different cluster of conservative entities and individuals drawn together in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 –The Presidential Transition Project. Founded in the 1970s, the Heritage Foundation has served as a center for conservative academics, intellectuals, and policy-makers since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. Its newest effort is a volume of 900 pages, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, meant to serve as a policy-making guide for a second Trump administration. “This book is the product of more than 400 scholars and policy experts from across the conservative movement and around the country. Contributors include former elected officials, world-renowned economists, and from four presidential Administrations. This is an agenda prepared by and for conservatives who will be ready on Day One of the next Administration to save our country from the brink of disaster.” It is worth noting that Trump is by no means the centerpiece of this document – rather, reference is made to “the next conservative President.” Trump is mentioned frequently and very respectfully, but the Heritage Foundation, its collaborators, and its program are framed as entities transcending this individual.6

(Also worth noting are a few odd wrinkles in this “Conservative Promise,” including a seeming overestimation of “the Left,” combined with an apparent borrowing of left-wing ideas – to be discussed in the final section of this analysis.)

The third essential element in Trumpism is today’s Republican Party. Leading figures and staffers of that party – as was the case with the conservative mainstream as a whole – did not begin as Trump supporters. One knowledgeable Republican operative, Tim Miller, describes what happened this way:


When the Trump Troubles began there wasn’t a single one in our ranks who would ever have said they were in his corner. To a person we found him gauche, repellent, and beneath the dignity of the public service we bestowed with bumptious regard. We didn’t take him seriously. … And you wouldn’t have caught us dead in one of those gaudy red baseball caps.

But, at first gradually and then suddenly, nearly all of us decided to go along. The same people who roasted Donald Trump as an incompetent menace in private served his rancid baloney in public when convenient. They continued to do so even after the mob he summoned stained the party and our ideals and the halls of the Capitol with their shit.7

Miller offers an insider’s view of a terrible cynicism permeating the Republican Party leadership, which contributed to Trump’s triumph within its ranks. Seeing the political arena as “a big game” through which – by winning – they “awarded themselves the status of public service, the Republican ruling class dismissed the plight of those we were manipulating, growing increasingly comfortable using tactics that inflamed them, turning them against their fellow man.” Miller and other operatives “advanced arguments that none of us believed” and “made people feel aggrieved about issues we had no intent or ability to solve.” He confesses that a quiet and unacknowledged racism was often employed. And “these tactics became not just unchecked but supercharged by a right-wing media ecosystem that we were in bed with and that had its own nefarious incentives, sucking in clicks and views through rage hustling without any intention of delivering something that might bring value to ordinary people’s lives.” Miller concludes:


Should it have come as a surprise that a charlatan who had spent decades duping the masses into joining his pyramid schemes and buying his shitty products would excel in such an environment? Someone who had a media platform of his own and a reptilian instinct for manipulation? Someone who didn’t hesitate to say the quiet part aloud?8

“Donald Trump cannot succeed alone,” mused Liz Cheney. “He depends upon enablers and collaborators.” Cheney, a lifelong conservative Republican and former Congressperson from Wyoming who resisted – more doggedly than most – Trump’s efforts to bully the Republican Party into supporting him, ended up lamenting that “we have now learned that most Republicans currently in Congress will do what Donald Trump asks, no matter what it is. … I am very sad to say that America can no longer count on a body of elected Republicans to protect our Republic.”9

Tim Miller identifies psychological reasons for this in discussing one of his friends. “Caroline has been sucked in by the cult,” he concludes. “She is obsessed with Trump and adores him, as incommodious as that may seem.” He sees a very dark dimension in this: “She’s the masochistic follower who feels a compulsion to be tested, abused and forced to prove they are deserving of the leader’s love over and over and over again.”10

Adam Kinzinger, former Republican Congressman from Illinois, reflects on the psychology of some of his colleagues, commenting: “More than they fear death, they fear being kicked out of a tribe, and they fear losing an identity.” The tribe is the Republican Party, and as for the identity: “You’re going to lose your identity as a member of Congress.”11According to Liz Cheney: “So strong is the love of power that men and women who had once seemed reasonable and responsible were suddenly willing to violate their oath to the Constitution out of political expediency and loyalty to Donald Trump.”12

Of course, the Republican Party has a long and complex history. Just as in the case of the other essential elements of Trumpism, it did not begin with Trump and will not end with him. He can be credited with playing the important role of helping to bring these elements together – but regardless of what happens to Trump, the larger phenomenon of “Trumpism” will be with us for some time to come.
Fascism of the past … and fascism in the making

One thing more. We are dealing with a global phenomenon noted by many different observers – involving powerful movements and, sometimes, governments in a diverse range of countries (Argentina, Brazil, France, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Russia, Turkey, the United States, and more). A combination of terms describes what is happening – right-wing populism, authoritarian xenophobic ultra-nationalism, etc. – indicating its complex content. Sometimes the word “fascism” is applied, but the term quasi-fascism seems more apt. The prefix quasi- means “resembling” and “having some, but not all of the features of.” The term quasi-fascism, in the present moment, can be understood as “fascism in the making.”

Fascism has been much analyzed and debated – among scholars as well as among left-wing theorists and activists. Here we will restrict ourselves to touching, first, on one of the earliest explorations in 1923 by Clara Zetkin (a close comrade of Rosa Luxemburg and a pioneer of German Communism), followed by 1940 comments of Leon Trotsky.

The global quality of this development was captured in the opening sentence of Zetkin’s 1923 analysis: “Fascism is the concentrated expression of the general offensive undertaken by the world bourgeoisie against the proletariat.”13It should be recalled that this particular “concentrated expression” was not embraced by the entire capitalist class – larger sections of the British bourgeoisie preferred support to Neville Chamberlin or Winston Churchill rather than Oswald Mosley, for example, and in the United States some elements from the capitalist class helped craft the New Deal program advanced by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But we cannot understand the realities of that time, and of our own, unless we engage with the global dimension stressed by Zetkin.

This global dimension is inseparable from another aspect of the reality that Zetkin identifies as a primary root of the fascist development, “the disintegration and decay of capitalist economy, and the symptom of the dissolution of the bourgeois State.” She adds that “symptoms of this decay of capitalism were observed even before the [First World] War.” But the catastrophic war “shattered capitalist economy to its foundation.” The result was “not only … the colossal impoverishment of the proletariat, but also … deep misery for the petty bourgeoisie, the small peasantry and the intellectuals.” As Zetkin notes, “all these elements had been promised that the war would bring about an amelioration of their material conditions. But the very opposite has happened,” with not only the devastation of war, but also a sudden, massive proletarianization, combined with mass unemployment, among “the former middle classes.” She observes: “It was among these elements that Fascism recruited quite a considerable contingent.”14

According to Zetkin, “the second root of Fascism lies in the retarding of the world revolution by the treacherous attitude of the reformist leaders.” She is referring here to the massive Social Democratic parties and unions. It is worth considering at length what she describes:


Large numbers of the petty bourgeoisie, including even the middle classes, had discarded their war-time psychology for a certain sympathy with reformist socialism, hoping that the latter would bring about a reformation of society along democratic lines. They were disappointed in their hopes. They can now see that the reformist leaders are in benevolent accord with the bourgeoisie, and the worst of it is that these masses have now lost their faith not only in the reformist leaders, but in socialism as a whole. These masses of disappointed socialist sympathisers are joined by large circles of the proletariat, of workers who have given up their faith not only in socialism, but also in their own class. Fascism has become a sort of refuge for the politically shelterless.15

This provides the analytical framework for Zetkin’s understanding of fascism. She makes a major point of distinguishing fascism from authoritarian right-wing violence such as that employed by forces around the reactionary military leader Miklós Horthy, savagely repressing Socialist and Communist workers in Hungary in 1919, replacing an abortive workers’ government with a right-wing dictatorship.

Zetkin insisted that this was not fascism: “Although the methods of both are similar, in essence they are different.” She explained: “The Horthy Terror was established after the victorious, although short-lived, revolution of the proletariat had been suppressed, and was the expression of vengeance of the bourgeoisie. The ringleaders of the White Terror were a quite small clique of former officers.” In contrast, fascism “is not the revenge of the bourgeoisie in retaliation for proletarian aggression against the bourgeoisie, but it is a punishment of the proletariat for failing to carry on the [socialist] revolution begun in Russia. The Fascist leaders are not a small and exclusive caste; they extend deeply into wide elements of the population.”16

Zetkin offers a complex and expansive understanding of fascism’s meaning:


The bourgeoisie wants to reconstruct capitalist economy. Under the present circumstances reconstruction of bourgeois class domination can be brought about only at the cost of increased exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is quite aware that the soft-speaking reformist socialists are fast losing their hold on the proletariat, and that there will be nothing for the bourgeoisie but to resort to violence against the proletariat. But the means of violence of the bourgeois States are beginning to fail. They therefore need a new organisation of violence, and this is offered to them by the hodge-podge conglomeration of Fascism. For this reason the bourgeoisie offers all the force at its command in the service of Fascism. Fascism has diverse characteristics in different countries. Nevertheless it has two distinguishing features in all countries, namely, the pretence of a revolutionary programme, which is cleverly adapted to the interests and demands of the large masses, and, on the other hand, the application of the most brutal violence.17

Zetkin’s analysis became influential within the early Communist International, although it was gradually adulterated, dogmatized, and diluted in the years stretching from 1923 to the Comintern’s 1943 dissolution. But it is clearly evident in Leon Trotsky’s end-of-life effort to summarize the essentials in his 1940 discussion of political perspectives in the United States. The bottom-line for revolutionaries – which constituted a headline of this section of the document – adds up to eight words: “Fascism Will Come Only If We Fail.” But, of course, Trotsky has much more to say. Two excerpts, however, will be sufficient. Here is the first:


In all the countries where fascism became victorious, we had before the growth of fascism and its victory, a wave of radicalism of the masses; of the workers and the poorer peasants and farmers, and of the petty bourgeois class. In Italy, after the war and before 1922, we had a revolutionary wave of tremendous dimensions; the state was paralyzed, the police did not exist, the trade unions could do anything they wanted – but there was no party capable of taking the power; as a reaction came fascism.18

Here is the second excerpt:


We must not identify war dictatorship – the dictatorship of the military machine, of the staff, of finance capital – with fascist dictatorship. For the latter there is first necessary a feeling of desperation of large masses of the people. When the revolutionary parties betray them, when the vanguard of workers shows its incapacity to lead the people to victory, then the farmers, the small businessmen, the unemployed, the soldiers, etc. become capable of supporting a fascist movement, but only then.19

The fascism described by Zetkin and Trotsky has not crystallized in the United States, but a plausible argument could be made that the converging elements of Trumpism represent fascism in the making.
The power, failure and future of the U.S. left

There are riddles to be solved. One involves precisely how the perspectives of Zetkin and Trotsky apply to the realities of the United States. Another involves the earlier mentioned “few odd wrinkles” in the Heritage Foundation’s “Conservative Promise” document of 2025. In solving these riddles, we will – hopefully – get a better sense of political realities in the United States, as well as the power, the failure, and the possible future of the U.S. Left.

We have already noted the global dimensions – no less the case now than was true in the time of Zetkin and Trotsky – of the issue we are dealing with. More than this, we are also seeing, in our time as in theirs, a decades-long crisis of capitalism which has generated capitalist policies detrimental to the living standards and to the quality of life for the laboring millions in multiple countries, including our own – the decades’ long restructuring of the economy associated with “globalization.” Catastrophic impacts of global environmental degradation, as well as imperialist violence on multiple fronts, are also in evidence.

On the other hand, at least superficially, the organized Left (whether headed by socialist or communist parties, militant trade unions, or whatever) is far from posing any revolutionary threat or even maintaining a credible presence – at least in Donald Trump’s homeland, the United States of America. This makes the Heritage Foundation’s “Conservative Promise” document seem an absurd, scare-mongering, slanderous exercise when (in the same breath as its complaints about the Democratic Party) it raises a hullabaloo about “the Left” and “the Marxists.”

Trotsky’s apparent promise was that we on the Left will have a shot at making a revolution before the threat of fascism becomes serious. This is how many of us understood the bald assertion that “Fascism Will Come Only If We Fail.” The possibility of Trumpism morphing into fascism would thereby be precluded. But this involves a serious misunderstanding of our history, which in a unique way does correspond to the development described by Zetkin and Trotsky. In an important sense, the scare-mongering conservatives of the Heritage Foundation have a point.

Over the past century, the organized Left has had powerful impact, influencing politics, laws, consciousness and culture within the United States. The labor movement, the waves of feminism, the anti-racist and civil rights movements, the struggles against the Vietnam war, the various student movements, and more – instrumental in bringing about far-reaching changes on the American scene over many decades – would not have been nearly as effective (and might not have come into existence) without the essential organizing efforts of left-wing activists.

This was accompanied by another development, however. Although a significant element among the left-wing activists insisted on the need for political independence from the pro-capitalist political parties, this was largely overpowered by a deep adaptationist trend. In the Red Decade of the 1930s, convergence between socialist-minded forces and a somewhat expansive social liberalism was especially accelerated, as the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) “stole” many reform components of the socialist program. This was done, as FDR insisted, to save capitalism during the angry Depression years – but also to ensure the continuing popularity and election of FDR. More than this, the bulk of the organized Left was absorbed into the New Deal coalition.20

Over half a century, six decisive pivots have made absorption of the organized Left into the Democratic Party almost complete. (1) The trade union movement of the 1930s – particularly the dynamically left-leaning new Congress of Industrial Organizations – formed a firm alliance with FDR’s New Deal Democrats. (2) A 1935 decision by the Communist International under Joseph Stalin to form a “People’s Front” alliance with liberal capitalists such as FDR, brought the dynamic U.S. Communists into the Democratic Party coalition. (3) At the start of the Cold War, the bulk of the organized labor movement (along with most moderate socialists) embraced the Democratic Party’s anti-Communist and liberal capitalist agenda, leading to a broad liberal capitalist “social compact” and consensus, from the late 1940s through the 1950s. (4) The civil rights coalition of the early 1960s became intimately entwined with the party of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. (5) Through the 1970s and 1980s, much of the 1960s “new left” would commit to the reform wing of the Democratic Party. (6) As the twenty-first century began to unfold, new waves of young activists joined with older layers – amid radical-sounding promises and soaring hopes – to put Barak Obama in the White House.

From the early twentieth century, the organized Left had been a dynamic force of considerable significance in the United States. Among workers and the oppressed, it had mobilized effective struggles that won genuine victories. It inspired hopes for further effective struggles that would advance human rights, improve the lives of the working-class majority, and bring to birth a better world. Among the wealthy and powerful, of course, it inspired fear and rage.

By the end of the century, through the process we have traced, the organized Left had largely evaporated. Some of its rhetoric, many of its values, and much of its reform agenda (often in diluted form) could be found in the Democratic Party. Yet a sincere and practical commitment to replace the economic dictatorship of capitalism with the economic democracy of socialism was no longer on the table. Nonetheless, among the wealthy and powerful there were those who still felt fear and rage, and also a deep determination to recover lost ground.21

The analyses of Zetkin and Trotsky can be adapted to this quite different context. “Soft-speaking reformist socialists are fast losing their hold on the proletariat,” according to Zetkin in the 1920s, particularly because “the reformist leaders are in benevolent accord with the bourgeoisie.” A hundred years later, in the United States, a highly compromised “working-class vanguard” in the trade unions (AFL-CIO) and in the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party had, arguably, shown “its incapacity to lead the people to victory,” particularly as the global capitalist economy entered an extended period of crisis. The reformists’ capitalist partners – initially so generous – felt compelled to restructure the economy at the expense of the working class, and the reformists felt able to do little more than adapt. As “too big to fail” corporations crashed the economy in 2008-2009, the newly elected radical-reformer, Barak Obama, hurried to bail out the corporate elite at the expense of the working-class majority. In such a situation – as security, stability, and the quality of life give way to social and economic catastrophe – masses of people who were disillusioned with this variant of the so-called “Left” were inclined, inevitably, to look for alternatives among right-wing demagogues.

The demagogues can be as crude as Trump, but they can be as polished as the Heritage Foundation. This brings us to another odd wrinkle in the “Conservative Promise” document. We have seen the logic of its “overestimation” of the Left. But more than once, it sounds a seemingly left-wing note, as in this radically flourished description of the American Revolution:


The American Republic was founded on principles prioritizing and maximizing individuals’ rights to live their best life or to enjoy what the Framers called “the Blessings of Liberty.” It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good— that the ruling class disdains.22

The seemingly left-wing note is sounded again and again. “Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them,” we are told. “They centralize power up and away from the American people.” The Conservative Promise adopts the tone of many a left-wing agitator: “America’s corporate and political elites do not believe in the ideals to which our nation is dedicated – self-governance, the rule of law, and ordered liberty. They certainly do not trust the American people, and they disdain the Constitution’s restrictions on their ambitions.” Taking advantage of the fact that so much of the so-called “Left” has unified with the Democratic Party elite’s pro-capitalist liberalism, the document announces that “socialists … are almost always well-to-do,” insisting that “the Left does not believe that all men are created equal – they think they are special,” adding: “Every hour the Left directs federal policy and elite institutions, our sovereignty, our Constitution, our families, and our freedom are a step closer to disappearing.”23

Despite the radical-democratic flourishes of The Conservative Promise, however, the bottom line is a defense of unrestrained capitalism. The primary goal of the President of the United States, we are told, should be to unleash “the dynamic genius of free enterprise,” because in countries where there is “a high degree of economic freedom, elites are not in charge because everyone is in charge.” According to The Conservative Promise, the elitism, corruption, greed, and contempt for ordinary people prevalent in the political sphere is miraculously absent in the economic sphere. Capitalist “free enterprise” is very wonderful indeed: “People work, build, invest, save, and create according to their own interests and in service to the common good of their fellow citizens.”24

From certain things The Conservative Promise says, and from what it fails to say, one can only assume that the document’s authors would welcome whatever support can be rendered to the realization of this glowing vision by forces that mobilized on January 6, 2021 to keep Donald Trump in office – Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, right-wing militias, white nationalist contingents, etc.

There is definitely a fascist potential in the current situation – some of the elements appear to have been crystallizing before our eyes. Whether or not this crystallization is completed, it seems clear that a different pathway is required for the Left than that of being trapped in an accommodation with capitalism, especially in this extended period of capitalist crisis and catastrophe. Revolutionaries will do what they can to rebuild and renew an orientation, a set of struggles, a movement and organization, consistent with the insights of Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, of Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, and of the many others who recognized that we face the fateful choice of genuine socialism or horrific barbarism.

Underlying crises, deep-felt oppressions, and repressed rage have periodically resulted in amazing activist explosions – such as the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Black Lives Matter upsurges, tilting political realities qualitatively leftward. This energizes and expands the numbers of those on the activist Left. Of course, such developments inevitably also deepen the fear and increase the determination of those on the Right – there’s no stopping that. Partisans of Trumpism will always use such things for their own purposes.

The problem is that the mass leftward rage and energies – which cannot be sustained indefinitely – presently have nowhere to go, once the dust settles, except in one of two directions: either apathetic quiescence or reformist channels. Those channels are compromised by corporate liberalism and have proved incapable of transcending the economic system that generates the crises, oppressions, and rage. The creation of something better and more effective than that appears to be on the agenda.251

Maggie Haberman, Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (New York: Penguin Books, 2022), p. 429.
2

Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2018), pp. 115-116.
3

Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump Under Fire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2019), p. 29.
4

A.O. Scott, “What Donald Trump Didn’t Say After His Trial,” New York Times, June 1, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/01/books/review/donald-trump-speech-verdict.html; Rex Huppke, “Guilty Trump’s Press Conference Was a Disaster,” USA Today, May 31, 2024, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/05/31/trump-verdict-press-conference-republicans-replacement-election/73923859007/; Hafiz Rashid, “Trump Loses It Like Never Before in Wildly Incoherent Press Conference,” The New Republic, May 31, 2024, https://newrepublic.com/post/182142/trump-incoherent-post-guilty-verdict-meltdown-press-conference. For the full press conference, see: “Former President Trump Conference Following Guilty Verdict,” C-Span, May 31, 2024, https://www.c-span.org/video/?536064-1/president-trump-press-conference-guilty-verdict
5

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, Peril (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2021), pp. 273-274; Matt Prince, “What is President Trump’s Relationship with Far-Right and White Supremacist Groups?,” Los Angeles Times, Sept. 30, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-09-30/la-na-pol-2020-trump-white-supremacy; Aram Roston, “The Proud Boys Are Back: How the Far-Right is Rebuilding to Rally Behind Trump,” Reuters, June 3, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-proudboys/.
6

Spencer Chretien, “Project 2025,” The Heritage Foundation, Jan. 31, 2023, https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/project-2025; Project 2025 - The Presidential Transition Project: Policy Agenda, including the text of Paul Dans and Steven Groves, ed., Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, https://www.project2025.org/policy/. For critical evaluations, see: E. Fletcher McClellan, “A Primer on the Chilling Far-Right Project 2025 Plan for 2nd Trump Presidency,” Lancasteronline, June 3, 2024, https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/a-primer-on-the-chilling-far-right-project-2025-plan-for-2nd-trump-presidency-column/article_ef88858e-1e9b-11ef-9e81-bf8485299455.html; Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, “Project 2025: The Far-Right Playbook for American Extremism,” https://globalextremism.org/project-2025-the-far-right-playbook-for-american-authoritarianism/. The quotation describing who composed to Project 2025 document is in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, pp. 2-3.
7

Tim Miller, Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell (New York: Harper, 2022), p. xii.
8

Miller, p. xx.
9

Liz Cheney, Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (New York: Little Brown and Co., 2023), pp. 2, 366.
10

Miller, p. 245.
11

“Former Rep. Kinzinger Reflects on GOP and Future of Democracy in ‘Renegade,’” (interview with Geoff Bennett), PBS News Hour, Nov. 1, 2023, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/former-rep-kinzinger-reflects-on-gop-and-future-of-democracy-in-renegade
12

Cheney, p. 2.
13

Clara Zetkin, “Fascism (August 1923),” Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1923/08/fascism.htm
14

Zetkin, “Fascism.”
15

Zetkin, “Fascism.”
16

Zetkin, “Fascism.”
17

Zetkin, “Fascism.”
18

Leon Trotsky, “American Problems” (August 7, 1940), Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1939-1940 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973), p. 337.
19

Trotsky, “American Problems,” p. 338.
20

Details and documentation on the Red Decade can be found in Paul Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in the Age of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 153-198, with aspects of subsequent years touched on in pp. 221-258.
21

This is traced in Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: W.W. Norton 2009), summarized in Paul Le Blanc, “The Triumphant Arc of US Conservatism,” Left Americana: The Radical Heart of US History (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), pp. 179-186.
22

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 14.
23

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, pp. 8, 10, 15, 16
24

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, pp. 14, 15
25

For efforts to define possibilities, see: Paul Le Blanc, “The Third American Revolution: How Socialism Can Come to the United States,” in Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith, eds., Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), pp. 249-261; Paul Le Blanc, “Pathways for Building a Revolutionary Party,” International Socialism, issue 164, 17 October 2019, https://isj.org.uk/pathways-for-building-a-revolutionary-party/; Paul Le Blanc, “Bernie Sanders, US Politics, and Socialism Today,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, August 13, 2019, https://links.org.au/paul-le-blanc-bernie-sanders-us-politics-socialism-today; Paul Le Blanc, “The Rise, Fall, and Aftermath of the Sander Challenge,” Irish Marxist Review, Volume 9, Number 27, 2020; Paul Le Blanc, Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2023), pp. 177-186.

Ian Angus’s ‘The War Against the Commons’: A vital new history of the bloody rise of capitalism

Steve Leigh
12 June, 2024


First published at Firebrand.


In Marxist theory, primitive accumulation is, as Marx defined it in Capital Volume I, “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” Occurring at different times in different regions around the world, primitive accumulation is the stage of history during which the ruling class took wealth from the lower classes — unjustly, usually by force or by theft — in order to accumulate the capital they would need to become the capitalist class.

The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism is an excellent new book on this history from Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus. It is a beautifully written examination of the rise of capitalism and the destruction of peasant livelihoods as the centuries-old social relations of feudalism were abandoned for a new mode of production. Though it largely focuses on the transformation of feudalism into capitalism in England and Scotland, it has many implications for socialist organizing and for environmentalism today.

Angus’s book is especially valuable for the way it sharply refutes the reactionary thesis of “the tragedy of the commons.” It also provides substantial clarity on Marx’s views of, as he put it, “so-called primitive accumulation.”
The rise of capitalism required the war on the commons

In The War Against the Commons, Angus argues that for hundreds of years, peasants had successfully managed common land to the benefit of all. They democratically decided on its use and did not over-exploit it as the reactionary thesis contends. Often peasants repartitioned the private strips of land around the common area to give every family enough land to survive.

Of course this was not some agrarian utopia. Under feudalism, landlords ruthlessly exploited the masses of peasantry, either as serfs, who were kept in bondage, or as free farmers who were still very much tied to the land. Peasants paid rent or performed service on the lord’s demesne (the lord’s private land, attached to their manor), or both. Peasants’ rights were limited and were at the whim of the lord when it came to justice. During times of war they might be called on to fight and die for the lord’s material interests.

But in return for that exploitation, peasants were allowed the collective use of common areas. The commons were absolutely essential to the livelihoods of the peasants.

Beginning with the rise of the market economy in the 15th century, landlords were under more pressure to raise revenue. As Angus writes, “Landed families which stuck to the old ways, left rents as they were and continued to grant long leases soon found themselves trapped between static incomes and rising prices.”

There were several related strategies employed by the landlords during this period of primitive accumulation: raising rents, enclosing the commons and adding it to their demesnes, consolidating farms into larger units, and replacing farming with sheep raising. The latter required less labor and created higher profits. Overt time, the economic differentiation of the peasantry — some peasants growing more wealthy while others slipped further into poverty — aided the landlords’ efforts.

The peasant class did not just go along with these land grabs and forcible changes to the previous social arrangement. They continually resisted these attacks that denied their livelihood, and peasant revolts broke out from time to time throughout this entire process.

These revolts peaked at particular times, sometimes culminating in revolutionary situations, such as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381. More often they involved re-taking common lands by tearing down fences and hedgerows. In the 1640s, these peasant revolts intersected with the English Revolution and Civil War.

According to Angus, the peasant revolts did not fuel either side of the Civil War exclusively. Though the Parliamentarians at first seemed to take the side of the peasants against the Royalists, in the end the consolidation of power by Parliament furthered the accumulation of land in the hands of the landlords.

The most radical elements during this period were the Diggers, who tried to extend communal ownership of land both physically and through political organizing.

At the beginning of the war against the commons, the English Crown tried to restrain enclosures. They feared depopulation that would deny the needed soldiers for war; and they also feared social unrest.

Thus, the Crown passed laws to slow down the enclosure process. But landlords, who often controlled the local justices of the peace, prevented effective enforcement of these laws. Over time, Crown resistance to land consolidation and enclosure waned as the new capitalist relations dominated the economy more and more.

Angus also examines the role of the “commonwealth men” who were theoretically against capitalist development, but also opposed peasant resistance to the rising power of capitalism. They were similar to the “feudal socialists” whom Marx and Engels denounced in the Communist Manifesto — the aristocrats who railed against the exploitation of the new capitalist order and attempted to sway the proletariat to their side, while still holding deeply reactionary views. “What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat,” they wrote, “as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.”

Despite the peasant revolts, the dominant trend was toward enclosure and consolidation as rural residents were expelled from the land. Many became vagabonds who tried to survive by begging and stealing. Over time, the peasants who were kicked off the land became the basis of the working class that capitalism needed in industry. Thus, primitive accumulation created the proletarian class even as it destroyed feudalism.

During this era, rural people with small cottages entered the capitalist system directly by working for capitalists as weavers or in other trades under the “putting-out system.” Under this system, merchants would sell raw materials to cottagers who would work it up into products. Merchants would then buy the finished product back at a fixed rate, rather than pay a wage.

Marx called this the “formal subsumption” of labor to capital as opposed to the “real subsumption” of wage labor.
Wage labor was the last resort

When peasants were expelled from the land, wage labor was the last resort for survival. Thus, people saw wage labor as another form of slavery. As Marx wrote in Capital:


A new class of wage-laborers was born in England when great masses of men were suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto the labor-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians.

Under feudalism, they had largely controlled their own labor. The work day was governed by the weather, seasons, and other natural conditions. Under capitalism, labor was controlled by the clock and working hours were longer.

To enforce wage labor, the state now dominated by capitalism used draconian methods, including actual slavery. “Poaching” was outlawed for the poor who needed food, but hunting was allowed for the rich who did not need it. For a period, England enforced the death penalty for hundreds of offenses, including poaching and petty theft, and also made regular use of transportation to the colonies in Australia and elsewhere.

The destruction of the old rural economy unleashed more people than the rising capitalist economy could absorb. Even if there was not enough wage work available, vagabonds were punished for not working for a master. The creation of capitalism was based on the horrific oppression of ordinary people.

This process of consolidating capitalism in England took hundreds of years, from the 15th to the 18th centuries. The practice of enclosure persisted well into the 19th century in England. In Scotland, it happened much faster after the English conquest; the results were equally bloody but much more condensed in time.

Apologists for capitalism contend that it made agriculture much more efficient. Angus thoroughly refutes this, showing that many of these improvements arose during the period of peasant management of the commons.

Angus also shows that caloric intake declined as capitalism rose. “Most industrial workers and agricultural laborers were malnourished,” he writes.

“They were less healthy and died younger than their ancestors a century earlier.” According to Angus, “The expansion of the capitalist world system caused a dramatic and prolonged process of impoverishment on a scale unprecedented in recorded history.”
The destructive birth of capitalism

Importantly, Angus explains Marx’s critical views of the war against the commons. Too many would-be Marxists stress the progressive nature of the rise of capitalism. Marx, on the other hand, saw it as a destructive process, even though it ultimately developed the productive forces that would allow the working class to take power and establish communism. As Marx famously put it, “Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

Marx preferred to discuss the war against the commons as “original expropriation” rather than primitive accumulation. Marx ultimately felt that “primitive accumulation” was too neutral a term — which is why he often qualified the phrase as so-called primitive accumulation.

Too many people miss Marx’s sarcasm when discussing this issue. Marx made it clear that capitalists stole their wealth from others rather than amassing it through hard work or intelligence, as the capitalist myth would have it. When workers no longer have access to the means of production, they end up having to work for those who stole it from them.

A large part of this original theft came from colonization. Angus explains the process of wealth seizure in the colonies as a further basis for the accumulation of capital in England. The effects on the native population of the Western Hemisphere and on enslaved Africans are well-known. As Marx wrote in Capital: “The veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.”

He goes on:


The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent , the beginnings of the conquest and looting of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.

Thus the issues raised by this history are directly relevant to anticolonial and antiracist struggles today.
Debates on the left and the ongoing relevance of the history of accumulation

According to Angus, the war against the commons continues to this day. He believes Marx saw expropriation as a continual basis of capitalism, not just a contained process occurring at its dawn. Though capitalism now dominates the world economy, the dispossession of the world’s peasantry continues. Capital still accumulates through expropriation.

This bears on current political controversies on the left. David Harvey, for example, focuses in his writings on current “accumulation by dispossession.” Harvey seems to downplay the importance of the basic process of mature capitalism: accumulation by exploitation — in other words, not paying workers the full value of what they produce. Angus does not explicitly endorse Harvey’s position but does argue the importance of the continuation of expropriation of peasant land.

This is an important emphasis which solidifies our understanding: “Since the late 1900s, capital’s continuing war against the commons has dispossessed millions of peasant families in Africa, Latin America and Asia.”

Modern-day peasant resistance to being forced off their land is certainly a struggle that the left should support. Peasants can be allies with workers in the war against capitalism — Marx agreed with this approach. Angus notes the positive attitude Marx had toward the peasant communes in Russia. He thought they could become the basis of a transformation to communism — but importantly only if connected to the international working-class revolution. Marx rejected a utopian view of the peasant commune.

Nor does Marx’s attitude mean that Marxists support the preservation of peasant property even after the working-class revolution. The goal is still collective control of the whole economy, including land, by the population as a whole.

In spite of the need for Marxists to defend the remaining commons, the current context is important. In the period that Angus focuses on in early modern England, capitalism was still forming. Most of the world was pre-capitalist. The seizure of the commons was absolutely essential to the rise of capitalism.

Today, the situation has been transformed. The world economy is now universally capitalist. Even the remaining peasant agriculture is largely commercial and integrated into the capitalist market. Subsistence agriculture, which was the essence of agriculture during the rise of capitalism, is now more marginal.

Over the last 141 years since Marx’s death, much of the common land has been taken by capitalists. The expropriation of peasant land today is a transfer of wealth among participants in the capitalist system. It is no longer the destruction of a pre-capitalist mode of production to make way for capitalism. Today, expropriation is an important supplement to exploitation, but only a supplement.

Contra Harvey, the main emphasis of anticapitalists today needs to be resistance against the exploitation of workers, and opposition to the oppression that divides workers. The form of a worker-peasant alliance will differ from country to country, but defense of peasants should be integrated into the working-class revolution rather than being seen as a separate struggle.

Angus argues that Marx and Engels were more flexible and less dogmatic than later Marxists are. He discusses how Engels was reluctant to give advice to Russian activists because of ignorance of Russian politics. Angus also says that Marx and Engels supported assassination as a political strategy in Russia even while opposing it in Britain.

This attitude is an important corrective to dogmatism. Marxists need to understand the political and economic situation before pronouncing on it. We must learn before we can teach! However, the world has transformed in the last 140 years. The spread of the capitalist system across the world means that Marx’s strategies for the capitalist countries in the 1880s are more applicable across the world today than they were in his time. Although we need to understand the specifics of each situation, the broad contours of the focus on working-class struggle are applicable everywhere. The Communist Manifesto’s famous conclusion, “Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains,” is even truer today than when Marx and Engels wrote it.

This shift is shown by the changing strategy of Russian Marxists, including the Bolsheviks, before the Revolution. As capitalism developed in Russia in the early 20th century, they moved away from Marx’s positive attitude to the Narodniks, who were oriented to the peasantry. Instead, they focused on organizing the industrial working class.

Finally, Angus raises the very important issue of overcoming the division between the town and country. Marx and Engels were very clear on the importance of spreading the population rather than having it concentrated in cities. They saw this as similar to the abolition of class division. In The Housing Question (1878), Engels wrote, “The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage workers.”

The War Against the Commons is a brilliant examination of the rise of capitalism. It smashes some of the bases of capitalist ideology, and vindicates the possibility of democratic control of the earth. It makes a valuable contribution to current debates on the left, connecting anticapitalism to defense of the environment. It shows that capitalism has always been opposed to ecological sanity — for example demonstrating the direct connection between capitalism and fossil fuels, especially coal.

For all these reasons, it is a must-read for socialists and for all who care about the future of humanity and the planet.


Steve Leigh (he/him) is a founding member of Firebrand and the Seattle Revolutionary Socialists. He has been an active Marxist since 1971 and was a founding member of the International Socialist Organization. He was a shop steward in SEIU for 35 years and is a member of the retirees chapter of SEIU 925. Read more from Steve on his blog.

 

Democracy Will Not Come through Compromise and Fear

by Vijay Prashad / June 13th, 2024

Aisha Khalid and Imran Qureshi (Pakistan), Two Wings to Fly, Not One, 2017.

Half of the world’s population will have the opportunity to vote by the end of this year as 64 countries and the European Union are scheduled to open their ballot boxes. No previous year has been so flush with elections. Among these countries is India, where a remarkable 969 million voting papers had to be printed ahead of the elections that culminated on 1 June. In the end, 642 million people (roughly two-thirds of those eligible) voted, half of them women. This is the highest-ever participation by women voters in a single election in the world.

Meanwhile, the European Union’s 27 member states held elections for the European Parliament, which meant that 373 million eligible voters had the opportunity to cast their ballot for the 720 members who make up the legislative body. Add in the eligible voters for elections in the United States (161 million), Indonesia (204 million), Pakistan (129 million), Bangladesh (120 million), Mexico (98 million), and South Africa (42 million) and you can see why 2024 feels like the Year of Elections.

Alfredo Ramos Martínez (Mexico), Vendedora de Alcatraces (‘Calla Lily Vendor’), 1929.

Over the past few weeks, three particularly consequential elections took place in India, Mexico, and South Africa. India and South Africa are key players in the BRICS bloc, which is charting a path towards a world order that is not dominated by the US. The nature of the governing coalitions that come to power in these countries will have an impact on the grouping and will certainly shape this year’s BRICS Summit to be held in Kazan (Russia) in late October. While Mexico is not a member of BRICS and did not apply for membership during the expansion last year, the country has sought to relieve itself of the pressures from the United States (most Mexicans are familiar with the statement ‘Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States’, made by Porfirio Diaz, the country’s president from 1884 to 1911). The Mexican government’s recent aversion to US interference in Latin America and to the overall neoliberal framework of trade and development has brought the country deeper into dialogue with alternative projects such as BRICS.

While the results in India and South Africa showed that the electorates are deeply divided, Mexican voters stayed with the centre-left National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), electing Claudia Sheinbaum as the first woman president in the country’s history on 2 June. Sheinbaum will take over from Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who leaves the presidency with a remarkable 80% approval rating. As the mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023 and a close ally of AMLO, Sheinbaum followed the general principles laid out in the Fourth Transformation (4T) project set out by AMLO in 2018. This 4T project of ‘Mexican Humanism’ follows three important periods in Mexico’s history: independence (1810–1821), reform (1858–1861), and revolution (1910–1917). While AMLO spoke often of this 4T as an advance in Mexico’s history, it is in fact a return to the promises of the Mexican Revolution with its call to nationalise resources (including lithium), increase wages, expand government jobs programmes, and revitalise social welfare. One of the reasons why Sheinbaum triumphed over the other candidates was her pledge to continue the 4T agenda, which is rooted less in populism (as the bourgeois press likes to say) and more so in a genuine welfarist humanism.

George Pemba (South Africa), Township Games, 1973.

In May of this year, thirty years after the end of apartheid, South Africa held its seventh general election of the post-apartheid era, producing results that stand in stark contrast to those in Mexico. The ruling tripartite alliance – consisting of the African National Congress (ANC), South African Communist Party, and Congress of South African Trade Unions – suffered an enormous attrition of its vote share, securing just 40.18% of the vote (42 seats short of a majority), compared to 59.50% and a comfortable majority in the National Assembly in 2019. What is stunning about the election is not just the decline in the alliance’s vote share but the rapid decline in voter turnout. Since 1999, less and less voters have bothered to vote, and this time only 58% of those eligible came to the polls (down from 86% in 1994). What this means is that the tripartite alliance won the votes of only 15.5% of eligible voters, while its rivals claimed even smaller percentages. It is not just that the South African population – like people elsewhere – is fed up with this or that political party, but that they are increasingly disillusioned by their electoral process and by the role of politicians in society.

A sober appraisal of South Africa’s election results shows that the two political forces that broke from the ANC – Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom Fighters – won a combined 64.28% of the vote, exceeding the vote share that the ruling alliance secured in 1994. The overall agenda promised by these three forces remains intact (ending poverty, expropriating land, nationalising banks and mines, and expanding social welfare), although the strategies they would like to follow are wildly different, a divide furthered by their personal rivalries. In the end, a broad coalition government will be formed in South Africa, but whether it will be able to define even a social democratic politics – such as in Mexico – is unclear. The overall decline in the population’s belief in the system represents a lack of faith in any political project. Promises, if unmet, can go stale.

Kalyan Joshi (India), Migration in the Time of COVID, 2020.

In the lead-up to the election in India, held over six weeks from 19 April to 1 June, incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said that his party alone would win a thumping 370 seats in the 543-seat parliament. In the end, the BJP could only muster 240 seats – down by 63 compared with the 2019 elections – and his National Democratic Alliance won a total of 293 (above the 272-threshold needed to form a government). Modi will return for a third term as prime minister, but with a much-weakened mandate. He was only able to hold on to his own seat by 150,000 votes, a significant decrease from the 450,000-vote margin in 2019, while fifteen incumbent members of his cabinet lost their seats. No amount of hate speech against Muslims or use of government agencies to silence opposition parties and the media was able to increase the far-right’s hold on power.

An April poll found that unemployment and inflation were the most important issues for two-thirds of those surveyed, who say that jobs for city dwellers are getting harder to find. Forty percent of India’s 1.4 billion people are under the age of 25, and a study by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy showed that India’s youth between the ages of 15 and 24 are ‘faced with a double whammy of low and falling labour participation rates and shockingly high unemployment rates’. Unemployment among young people is 45.4%, six times higher than the overall unemployment rate of 7.5%.

India’s working-class and peasant youth remain at home, the sensibility of their entire families shaped by their dilemmas. Despair at everyday life has now eaten into the myth that Modi is infallible. Modi will return as prime minister, but the actualities of his tenure will be defined partly by the grievances of tens of millions of impoverished Indians articulated through a buoyant opposition force that will find leaders amongst the mass movements. Among them will be farmers and peasants, such as Amra Ram, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and All India Kisan Sabha (‘All India Farmers’ Union’) who won decisively in Sikar, an epicentre of the farmers’ movement. He will be joined in parliament by Sachidanandam, a leader of the All India Kisan Sabha and Communist Party of India (Marxist) from Dindigul (Tamil Nadu), and by Raja Ram Kushwaha, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation from Karakat (Bihar) and the convenor of the All-India Kisan Sangharsh (‘All India Farmers’ Struggle’) Coordination Committee, a peasant alliance that includes 250 organisations. The farmers are now represented in parliament.

Nitheesh Narayanan of Tricontinental Research Services writes that even though the Left did not send a large contingent to parliament, it has played an important role in this election. Amra Ram, he continues, ‘enters the parliament as a representative of the peasant power that struck the first blow to the BJP’s unquestioned infallibility in North India. His presence becomes a guarantee of India’s democracy from the streets’.

Heri Dono (Indonesia), Resistance to The Power of Persecution, 2021.

The idea of ‘democracy’ does not start and finish at the ballot box. Elections – such as in India and the United States – have become grotesquely expensive. This year’s election in India cost $16 billion, most of it spent by the BJP and its allies. Money, power, and the corrosiveness of political dialogue have corrupted the democratic spirit.

The search for the democratic spirit is at least as old as democracy itself. In 1949, the communist poet Langston Hughes expressed this yearning in his short poem ‘Democracy’, which spoke then to the denial of the right to vote and speaks now to the need for a much deeper consideration of what democracy must mean in our times – something that cannot be bought by money or intimidated by power.

Democracy will not come
Today, this year,
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
Listen, America—
I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

 

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Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. Prashad is the author of twenty-five books, including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World and The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Read other articles by Vijay, or visit Vijay's website.