No Matter Who Sits in the White Peoples’ 

MAN'S House the War Being Waged by the U.S. Colonial/Capitalist Class Against the Black Colonized Working Class and All Oppressed Peoples and Nations Will Continue

by Black Alliance for Peace / November 21st, 2024

Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…

— Amilcar Cabral (Revolution in Guinea, stage 1, London, 1974, p 70-72)

It was under the Democrats and the first “Black” president that the Department of Defense 1033 program that militarizes local police forces was expanded by 2,400%; the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) expanded by 1,900%; Libya, the most prosperous African  and Pan African nation was attacked and destroyed; the war on Yemen began; the Occupy Wall Street Movement was smashed; the FBI created the “Black Identity Extremist” label; the banks were bailed out from the economic collapse that they created, but not the working class; Black people lost more wealth  than was lost at the end of Reconstruction in 1870s; and, despite police killings across the country, including Mike Brown in Ferguson, the Obama administration only brought Federal charges against one killer-cop.  Yet, with the return of Trump, opportunists in our communities and beyond are telling us that the real culprits in our oppression and the targets for opposition are Trump and republicans.

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) rejects this kind of ahistorical opportunism.

We are clear. The anti-democratic duopoly is made up of  representatives of the capitalist class and provides cover for what is, in reality, the dictatorship of capital. In this, the duopoly reveals the class nature of the state. This dictatorship, the true enemy of the people, is the target of our agitation and organizing.

Focusing attention on the Trumpian wing of the capitalist class as the primary or principal contradiction facing the people in the U.S. or in the world, obscures the reality that the dominant wing of capital, finance capital, along with the U.S. based transnational corporations, have captured and are operating through both parties. However, it is the democratic party wing of the dictatorship of capital that has championed what is popularly referred to as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, first given coherence under Ronald Reagan, eventually migrated to the democratic party under Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council, whose “third way politics” aligned with both neoliberals and neoconservatives (neocons). Trumpism is the particular (national) manifestation of the global crisis of neoliberal capitalism. The republican party’s capture of the executive and all branches of government will not resolve the structural contradictions of neoliberal capital. What we can expect, then, is the strengthening of the repressive state apparatus and more targeted repression. To be clear, this process would have continued under a Harris administration because Harris promised to maintain the same trajectory of state repression in the name of capital. Because of the bipartisan jettisoning of liberal democratic and human rights in favor of the capitalist order, it does not matter which individual is sitting in the white peoples’ house. Therefore, the correct approach for opposition forces is one that grounds the people’s understanding of the objective structural contradictions of the capitalist order and that builds their capacity to struggle against that order  – regardless of which wing of the duopoly represents it. Focusing on only one part of the duopoly is akin to focusing on only one faction of the capitalist class.

Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, BAP expects Trump will govern as a neoliberal. That is why certain elements of the ruling class turned to him again. Continued austerity, especially at the state and local levels, will persist, as well as privatization of public assets, tax breaks for the capitalist class, the suppression and repression of labor, fiscal and monetary policies that prop-up capitalist profits and undermine human rights and, of course, the targeted use of military power to advance the interests of the capitalist dictatorship. We believe, however, that Trump will make as his main mission the primary concern of the neoliberal elite:  smashing the movement toward de-dollarization.

We cannot afford to have any illusions or harbor any sentimentality about the nature of this system. As we organize in political spaces controlled by Black democrats, it would be suicidal if we did not understand the role these neocolonial puppets play – primarily against any organized opposition – in the war that capital is waging against the people. Under Biden-Harris, we saw  police, judicial, and media suppression of mobilizations in solidarity with the Palestinian people, the student intifada, the Uhuru 3, African Stream media, and many others. And it is no coincidence that so-called “cop cities” are being constructed across the country in those urban areas being managed by Black democrat party functionaries or, what Black Agenda Report refers to as the “Black Misleadership Class.”

This corrupted Black petit-bourgeois professional/managerial class, positioned in government, corporate and non-profit sectors, provides the buffer and role models for individual material advancement at the expense of the Black working class.

And while we are dealing with cop cities, we also understand what is coming with the mass deportations of non-white migrants and the violent law and order rhetoric that is already emanating from the Trumpian forces. But let us not forget that, under the Biden-Harris regime, mass deportations rose by 250 percent, of which Harris campaigned on being “tough” on the border. Anti-immigrant rhetoric is also bipartisan.

Like all people, we want to live decent, prosperous lives in peace and in harmony with all humanity and nature. But we are going to have to fight for peace. And for that struggle BAP is guided by the principles of the Black radical peace tradition that states clearly:

Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

That is the task and the responsibility that we take on. We are not afraid of any individual or oppressive system. We gladly take on this fight with the certainty that one day we will defeat the Pan European white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy that is the enemy of collective humanity.

The struggles and sacrifices being made by the Palestinian peoples to defend their dignity and popular sovereignty is the example we embrace. This is why we say that, no matter the circumstances, no matter the challenge, no matter the intensity of the repression, we are building on the sacrifices of our people and guided by revolutionary principles. Our call will always be:

No Compromise, No Retreat!

Who Control’s Afghanistan’s Stolen Assets: A Factsheet

by Black Alliance for Peace / November 20th, 2024

In August 2021, following the withdrawal of major U.S./NATO military forces from Afghanistan after two decades of occupation, Taliban forces took effective control over the country. In response, the United States seized the assets of Afghanistan’s central bank totaling around $7 billion. Half of that amount was transferred to the misleadingly named “Afghan Fund” in September 2022, a Swiss-based “charitable foundation” whose only role thus far has been to privately conceal and invest the funds without any concrete plans to return them, as confirmed by U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Thomas West. This runs contrary to popular demands by experts and humanitarian organizations who argue that a return of the funds is desperately needed now more than ever to help everyday Afghans.

Afghan women do not have any representation on the board of the “Afghan Fund,” nor do they have any official say over whether the assets should be returned. The board of trustees includes: two men selected by the U.S. State Department, Anwar ul-Haq Ahady and Shah Mehrabi, the U.S. Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs Jay Shambaugh, and Swiss government official Ambassador Alexandra Baumann.

According to a July 2024 press statement from the board of the “Afghan Fund,” some of the stolen assets may also be disbursed to the Asian Development Bank, an institution controlled by the United States, Japan, and Australia via majority shareholder status. While the funds are not returning to the Afghan people, this move shows that a process to return the funds to Afghanistan can begin immediately if the board members agree to do so. Regardless of whether the funds are in fact disbursed elsewhere over time, board members Ahady, Mehrabi, Shambaugh, and Baumann are all culpable in the forced starvation and impoverishment of tens of millions of Afghans – tantamount to the collective punishment of the Afghan people.

According to a January 2024 written testimony by the U.S. Congress-established Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the remaining $3.5 billion in sovereign funds held in the United States may eventually be transferred to the “Afghan Fund” depending on litigation filed by the families of 9/11 victims and other plaintiffs, while other funds held in Europe and the United Arab Emirates may also be added to the “Afghan Fund.” SIGAR found that none of the funds in the “Afghan Fund” as of early 2024 have been spent, are planned to be spent, or will ever be used to provide humanitarian or development assistance. Notably, while no disbursements have been made for the benefit of the Afghan people, portions of the over $340 million in interest that have been accrued from the stolen assets are being used to pay for the “Afghan Funds” operational and administrative costs.

The sudden deprivation of access to its sovereign assets led to a sharp economic and financial crisis in Afghanistan in 2021, which a recent United Nations Development Program (UNDP) study found is disproportionately affecting women and children. The seizure of assets combined with both U.S. and UN sanctions – ostensibly only targeting the Taliban – have hurt ordinary Afghans and aid organizations, affirmed by US-aligned rights groups and media outlets. The same UNDP report found that 69% of Afghans “do not have adequate resources for basic subsistence living,” while an estimated 15.8 million Afghans – including nearly 8 million children – are expected to experience “acute food insecurity” throughout 2024.

Clearly, the “Afghan Fund” – controlled by Western officials and Afghan compradors – has deliberately withheld billions from the suffering Afghan populace. It should be reiterated that a process to return these stolen funds, and in turn mitigate the U.S.-enabled humanitarian and economic crises plaguing Afghanistan, can and must begin right away. The following individuals have full power or influence over the release of the illegally stolen assets back to its rightful owners: the Afghan people.

Jay Shambaugh

Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for International Affairs

• Visiting Associate Professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University
• Former Consultant to the International Monetary Fund (2005, 2008, 2011-2013)
• Former Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution (2017-2020)
• Former Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors (2015-2017)
• Former Chief Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (2009-2011)

Alexandra Baumann

Head of the Prosperity and Sustainability Division at the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs

• Former Diplomatic Advisor of the Head of the Swiss Federal
• Department of Finance
• Previously worked in the Swiss Embassies in Chile and
• Germany, and the Swiss Mission to the UN in New York

Anwar ul-Haq Ahady

Former government official, economic advisor and central banker to the U.S./NATO occupied Afghanistan

• Former Minister of Commerce and Industry (2010-2013) and Minister of Agriculture (2020-2021)
• Former Minister of Finance and Advisor of National Economy to the U.S./NATO-backed President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai (2004-2009)
• Previously responsible for overseeing Afghanistan’s central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank (2002-2004)

Shah Mehrabi

Member of the Supreme Council of Da Afghanistan Bank

• Professor of Economics at Montgomery College in Maryland
• Former Senior Economic Advisor to previous Ministers of Finance under U.S./NATO occupied Afghanistan

Thomas West

U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Deputy Assistant Secretary

• Former Vice President at a private global strategic advisory firm, the Cohen Group (2016-2021)
• Former Special Advisor at the UN National Security Council to the U.S. Vice President for South Asia and the U.S. Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan (2012-2015)
• Former U.S. State Department senior diplomat in Kunar Province, Afghanistan (2011-2012)
• Former Special Assistant for South and Central Asia to the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (2008-2010)

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) seeks to recapture and redevelop the historic anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-peace positions of the radical black movement. Read other articles by Black Alliance for Peace, or visit Black Alliance for Peace's website.

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.

The Revolution Will Not Be Podcast: Pacifica Radio at 75

Iain Boal

October 4, 2024

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The Exacting Ear, ed. Eleanor McKinney, Pantheon 1966.

At three o’clock on a spring afternoon in 1949, in a sixth floor studio above University Avenue in Berkeley, volunteer sound-proofers, “hammering down the carpet at the last moment”, paused in their work. Lewis Hill stepped to a microphone and in his distinctive baritone announced for the first time: “This is KPFA, listener-sponsored radio in Berkeley.” It was an experiment so unlikely (“Why would anyone subscribe to a station they can hear for free?”) that the scoffers in the local Bay Area press predicted it would be lucky to survive six months.

Seventy five years later, the survival of KPFA, founded by conscientious objectors, poets and pacifists in the aftermath of a catastrophic global war, was celebrated by a flying visit to the Bay Area from Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now! which started life in the mid-1990s broadcasting from the Wall Street studios of WBAI, Pacifica’s New York station.

Goodman is a star in the firmament of community radio, and her tribute to Pacifica’s history, in which she has played such a central role for three decades, was warmly applauded by the congregation at the Church of Christ Scientist, Maybeck’s gorgeous architectural masterpiece on the south side of the Berkeley campus. Perhaps the spirit of the occasion forebade mention of the fact that, directly across the street, People’s Park – a landmark both in the history of the city and of KPFA – lies invisible and impenetrable, brutally enclosed by barbed wire and a ring of steel containers planted by the University of California administration bent on erasing both the park and the popular memory of what happened there in the 60s.

The struggle over People’s Park and Pacifica’s own Civil War, triggered by Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 and culminating in the so-called Battle of Berkeley in 1999, are connected through the deep history of settler-colonial dispossession, neoliberal enclosures and now a re-privatization of the liberated common land. The ill-judged revision of the network’s governance in response to the drastic deregulation of the airwaves has left KPFA, and the Pacifica Foundation that owns the station, in deep financial and managerial trouble.

The originating impulse of the Pacifica project, poetically named as a gesture to the founding vision, was to explore through peaceable dialogue the root causes of conflict — between individuals, nations, and belligerent empires. By bringing to the airwaves “informal, intensely personal, uncensored, and free-ranging discussion” – the description is philosopher Erich Fromm’s – together with the finest of the radio arts, the listening community would be equipped with an “exacting ear”, in the happy phrase of Eleanor McKinney, one of the trio of syndicalist founders.

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There is a special intimacy to radio when not used for commercial or state propaganda, understood as the discourse of domination. The tone and rhythm of those first KPFA broadcasts are crucial to understanding the power of “the Pacifica idea” and the enduring loyalty it has evoked in its audience. Recollecting the very early days at the station, another of the founders, the poet and documentarian Richard Moore, expressed it to me this way: “It was our experiment with form that was radical, as much as any content.” Margot Adler, a student at Berkeley in the mid-60s and later host of a phone-in show on Pacifica’s New York station, recalled: “It’s hard to imagine how different it was to hear someone talking honestly — about anything — on the air.”

The bonds forged between the Pacificans and the audience they conjured out of the air was tested after fifteen months, when in the summer of 1950 the money ran out. Lewis Hill’s imagined audience showed up in the flesh at a packed community meeting at the Fellowship Hall in Berkeley, intent on bailing out the sinking vessel. Lewis Hill was never so moved as by that gathering; “We can’t let this die”, he told his confederates. With collective self-salvage in mind, Hill argued in his 1951 manifesto, “The Theory of Listener Sponsored Radio”, that the KPFA experiment entailed a “two-way responsibility”, a “conscious flow of influences, some creative tension between broadcaster and audience”.

What was “the Pacifica idea”? Firstly, for those at the microphone the freedom of not having “to simulate emotions, intentions and beliefs” was the essence. Hill had not shed a vague sense of ethical corruption from his time as an announcer at a commercial radio station in Washington DC – “the words are familiar, and every sentence is grammatically sound, but the text is gibberish”). “The people who actually do the broadcasting should also be responsible for what and why they broadcast”, insisted Hill the syndicalist. At the other end of the apparatus, for the project to succeed, the listener subscribers demonstrated what he called “a kind of cultural engagement”, amounting to a “mutual stimulus”. Success for Hill would mean the pilot experiment resulting in “a new focus of action or a new shaping influence that can hardly fail to strengthen all of us”. The “us” began for Hill with his personal circle of friends and comrades —the war resisters of the CO camps and the poets, artists and writers in San Francisco’s bohemia — but the aim was also to reach, via the apparatus of radio, the shipyards of Richmond and the neighbourhoods of Oakland.

Hill understood very well that listener-sponsorship could go wrong, if subscribing were reduced, as he said, to a tax write-off, or a response to special gift premiums (“We’ve got hoodies, we’ve got socks, we’ve got water bottles – check it out!”, cajoled one announcer during a recent fund drive on KPFA.) ‘Underwriting’ by big business has led directly to the soporific diet now on offer from NPR. (Is that why they’re constantly advertising mattresses?) The recent decision by Pacifica’s management to take advertisers’ money suggests that it may be time to wind up the experiment. Indeed there might be no option. Some readers of CounterPunch will recall the news that, in December 2022, US marshals seized 305,000 dollars from KPFA’s cash reserves to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by a former interim executive director of the Pacifica Foundation, the legal owner of the station. Since then there have been staff layoffs and preparations to sell off physical assets. KPFA, the flagship of the five listener-sponsored stations, is now in real danger of sinking along with its owner and the rest of the network, thanks to mismanagement at the national level and the perversely bloated Pacifica governance structure adopted in the wake of the crisis of 1999-2001.

Can the Pacifica network survive? Notoriously, Pacifica thrives in times of emergency. Dan Coughlin, the executive director who guided the network away from the brink of bankruptcy at the millennium, drily quipped: “War is the health of the station”. Pacifica’s fortunes wax and wane according to the rhythms of the US imperium. Margot Adler, host of ‘Hour of the Wolf’ in the 1970s, put it bluntly: “The Vietnam War ended, and we lost half our audience. It was as simple as that. WBAI grew from the blood of the Vietnamese.”

Some veteran activists believe that KPFA remains a viable institution, provided that the station can get out from under the Pacifica Foundation, owner turned parasite — and lately, asset stripper. The business of cutting KPFA free from its incubus will require serious forensic skills, and very likely some real street heat.

In any case a campaign for KPFA’s survival will have to be waged in the current mediascape, including the new (anti-)social media, whose wider context is the political economy of telecommunications in the US. The situation remains fundamentally unchanged since I spoke at a Federal Communications Commission Hearing on Media Ownership, in the aftermath of the 1996 Telecommunications Act which led to a predictable looting of the public airwaves (see “A May Day Message to the FCC”, CounterPunch, April 30th, 2003). I noted that “the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements well understand the lethal connections between the so-called market, concentrated media ownership, and untrammeled militarism.” I still stand by my assertion to the Commission that “the flourishing of life…around the planet, now depends on the reappropriation of the commons, and that includes – because the means of communication without limits is the very condition of possibility of all else – the seizing back of the electromagnetic spectrum, the de-commodification of the airwaves.”

Now, suppose the good ship Pacifica goes under. What would be lost? Above all, a dependable forum for the candid and dissenting dialogics that inspired the original vision, still embodied in a handful of excellent Public Affairs programs the founding trio would recognize – such as Letters and Politics, Against the Grain, and Behind the News. The rhythm and cadence of Against the Grain, for example, is recognisably in a venerable KPFA tradition, and helps to account for its enduring vitality. The interviews are recorded in advance, impeccably edited, and broadcast three days a week at noon. Taking turns at the microphone, and making decisions independently as to topics and guests, the hosts Sasha Lilley and C.S. Soong evince a congenial complementarity in style and emphasis. Soong is inclined to the philosophical and esoteric (the shade of Alan Watts hovers nearby), while Lilley clearly draws on her training in political economy. Questions are always posed in a spirit of open inquiry, with the aim of drawing out, maieutically, the fruits of new scholarship or critique, often focused on a recently published book, essay or article. By their deep, evident commitment to socratic form, and by coming to the interviews formidably prepared, a mutual respect with the interlocutor is quickly established and conveyed to the listener.

The original idea for the program emerged in discussions in 2002 between the two producers, who agreed there was a kind of vacuum in strategic thinking on the left. The reasons were perhaps not hard to find. Violent state repression directed at the worldwide movement against capitalist enclosures, aka “globalisation”, had taken a toll, both in the streets and in the theory kitchens. The repression only intensified in the wake of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center.

It was clear to Lilley and Soong that, for antagonists of capital and empire, these new conditions lacked critical scrutiny. “When we launched”, recalls Sasha Lilley, “we felt strongly that many of the ideas of the anti-globalization movement, the antiwar movement, and the left more broadly, needed interrogation. Apparently many KPFA listeners agreed, because when C.S. Soong and I ran a four part series challenging conventional wisdom on the left, called Free Radicals, it led to a flurry of emails to KPFA management asking for more.”

An opening in KPFA’s schedule gave them the opportunity for extending the interrogations. In their sights, recalls Lilley, was “the localism fetish of the global justice movement; the anti-war movement’s “No Blood for Oil” simplification, the romanticizing of the subaltern and the Global South; and of course conspiracism instead of anticapitalist analysis.”

The boisterous street carnivals of refusal north and south, galvanised by the spellbinding—and spell-breaking—eloquence of Subcommandante Marcos, and amplified by vibrant indymedia, seemed briefly to herald the birth of a countervailing force that might truly disrupt the specialists in ’structural adjustment’ at the IMF and WTO. But the ’second superpower’ (to use the anxious, hyperventilating language of the New York Times commentariat), which flared brightly in Seattle, Porto Allegre and around the planet, turned out to be a will o’ the wisp, its fragile transnational infrastructure interrupted by, among other things, ‘anti-terrorist’ restrictions on travel. In the assessment of Seamus Davis, cartographer of anticapitalist resistance, “By 2003 the movement was punching below its weight”. Things were not helped by the widespread privileging of activism at the expense of analysis and reflection. “Activist” had become, at least in the US, a badge of identity, an occupation without any content except perhaps a romancing of barricades, which, as their historian Eric Hazan drily observed, were already out of date by 1871.

Two decades on, Against the Grain is going strong. It has been, by any worthwhile measure, a resounding success of the kind the founders of the station hoped for, though they could hardly have imagined the instantaneous planetary reach of the program made possible by the internet. The roster of guests amounts to a pantheon of contemporary radical thought —  to name just a few: geographer David Harvey, socialist feminist Silvia Federici, demographer Amartya Sen, urbanist Mike Davis, classicist Ellen Meiksins Wood, economist Thomas Piketty, historians Robin D. G. Kelley, Peter Linebaugh, Vijay Prashad and Howard Zinn, linguist Noam Chomsky, anthropologist David Graeber, journalist Naomi Klein, psychiatrist Joel Kovel, lawyer Staughton Lynd, sociologist Frances Fox Piven. The program’s archive is a treasure house of critical exchange in the early 21st century.

No doubt Against the Grain could take its chances – likewise Doug Henwood’s Behind the News and Mitch Jeserich’s Letters and Politics – and even flourish among the flood of podcasts coming online at the rate of 500 a week (although half of them expire within six months.) Against the Grain, by now an institution within an institution, has conjured into being an ‘imagined community’, albeit uncertain of its collective powers. We badly need such a program in the days ahead, to assist in the hard work of root-and-branch rethinking of the terms and tactics necessary to a planetary politics for commoners, after the Holocene.

I believe it’s also important for KPFA listeners to organize against the loss of the station’s bricks-and-mortar studios, an underused community asset moored like a ghost ship on MLK Way in Berkeley, and to keep broadcasting from Grizzly Peak and its 94.1MHz home on the FM dial, an island in the privatised spectrum, amid the rumbling basso continuo of commercial America (“I drive my car to supermarket / The way I take is superhigh /A superlot is where I park it /And Super Suds are what I buy.”) It was a minor miracle in a nation Melville saw as dedicated only to commerce that Lewis Hill’s pilot experiment took flight. The choice of fare on offer – drama and literature, music, public affairs, children’s programming – was only part of the magic; more potent was the mutual recognition, respect and camaraderie that passed between the pioneering broadcasters and the audience conjured into being.

Unfortunately, the essential syndicalist principles were overlooked – Hill’s anarchist comrades warned him that worker control would be broken on the anvil of bureaucratic governance required by federal regulation, if state censorship didn’t get them first. It’s a grim irony that the new internal governance structure, put in place after the crisis of 1999 to safeguard the network, may materially contribute to the demise of the Pacificans’ noble experiment.

The radical Cornell scholar Benedict Anderson in the 1980s achieved intellectual fame for his notion of the “imagined community”, about which he later remarked that they were “a pair of words from which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood.” Anderson coined the phrase to theorize not the radio but the printing press and the emergence of “the nation,” specifically, the role of print capitalism in the spread of nationalism. Anderson defined the nation as a collection of strangers who do not know each other and will never meet but nevertheless are able to exert a world-changing social force. I think it fair to say that Lewis Hill had such business in mind when he composed “The Theory of Listener Sponsored Radio” back in 1951. But if KPFA is reduced, at best, to an online ‘platform’ of serial, atomized podcasts, then what will surely be lost is the integrating impulse of Hill’s vision, the possibility of a collectively imagined “focus of action” necessary to the building of a peaceable world.

Iain Auchinleck Boal is a social historian of science, technics and the commons. He is associated with the Retort group of antinomians based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In London, he co-founded MayDay Rooms, a safe haven for archives of dissent and a meeting place for weary utopians. He can be reached via carpenox@sonic.net>