Escalating Save-the-People-and-Planet Tactics

by Ted Glick / April 14th, 2023

Over the last couple of years there have been three books published, or about to be, which have dealt prominently with the question of whether violence against fossil fuel CEO’s and/or sabotage of fossil infrastructure is warranted. The case is made in all three that it might be given the absolute criminality of those CEO’s as they fight the shift away from fossil fuels and onto truly clean renewables, doing so despite certainty that unless we make that shift, and right now, the world’s ecosystems and its many life forms are in very deep trouble.

The first book was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. In this very important fictional book, a massive heat wave in India that kills tens of millions of people in 2025 leads to the emergence of an organized underground group which begins executing CEO climate criminals, with drones being the primary means of doing so.

The second was Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, from which a movie has been produced and is about to hit the theatres. The first 2/3rds of the book is an argument in favor of property destruction: “Damage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices. Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed. If we can’t get a prohibition [of all new CO2-emitting devices], we can impose a de facto one with our bodies and any other means necessary.”

Then, two-thirds into the book, he seems to have serious second thought.s.

He writes that “strict selectivity would need to be observed… It will be states that ram through the transition or no one will… [With] a Green New Deal or some similar policy package, property destruction would appear superfluous to many.” In addition, sabotage carries political risks. “In the eyes of the public, in the early twentieth-first century and particularly in the global North, property destruction does tend to come off as violent… Because of the magnitude of the stakes in the climate crisis, negative effects could be unusually ruinous here.”

Which brings us to the third book: Altar to an Erupting Sun, a novel by Chuck Collins, to be published next month. The shero in this book, 69 year old, longtime activist and organizer Rae Kalliher, suffering from terminal cancer with not long to live, is introduced at the beginning of the book arriving early one Easter morning at a compound with a mansion set back from the road behind an eight foot high wall. Clearly having done some scouting, she stops a Humvee as it drives out from behind the walls. When she recognizes her target—“the Oil Baron”–inside the car, she pushes a button on her vest, killing her, him and two members of his family.

The book then shifts back 50 years to 1973 and the awakening of a young Rae to issues of oppression and injustice. Much of the book is a recounting of the life experiences of a young person who becomes a dedicated progressive activist and organizer in the New England region of the USA and how, through those experiences and a commitment to helping to create a better world, she ends up doing what she did. Those experiences included:

-active involvement in the 70s with the movement against nuclear power, including the toppling by Sam Lovejoy of a huge tower part of plans to build a nuke plant in Franklin Country, Massachusetts, and the Clamshell Alliance campaign which successfully defeated plans for a nuke plant in southern New Hampshire;

-involvement in the 80s with Vietnam war veteran Brian Willson and the movement in support of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the FSLN in El Salvador in their efforts to overthrow military dictatorships and build more just societies;

-involvement in the 90s with Fr. Roy Bourgeois and the campaign to close the School of the Americas in Georgia, as well as groups in Boston working in support of the rights of tenants and against unjust evictions, into the 2000s;

-and in the latter years of the 2000s into the 2010s, helping to develop Mutual Aid groups, taking up permaculture in Vermont, followed by a growing understanding into the pandemic years of this decade of the seriousness of the climate crisis, learning about FERC and pipelines and taking action accordingly.

At one point author Collins has Rae exclaiming, “Get this: around 1978 Exxon’s own internal scientists studied climate change to analyze the risks to their business. They knew! Fifty years ago… The fuckers. This is the face of evil. There is a special ring in Hell for those who knowingly profit from the destruction of a habitable Earth.”

In 2022, after learning that she has terminal cancer, she tells Reggie, her lover/husband, one night, “I want to go out in an action. I want to make a statement about climate disruption, taking one of those fossil fuel CEOs with me. One of the guys who knew for decades about the harms of their business, but covered it up so they could grab more money.”

The closing chapter of the book is about a celebration in the community on what would have been Rae’s 76th birthday in 2030. Reggie, speaking about Rae, makes clear that seven years later, as deeply as he loved and respected her to the end, “what she did was wrong.”

In his book, Collins raises up the issue of elders in their final years taking risks or even deliberately giving their lives for Mother Earth and future generations. He does not write about Rae’s action being repeated by others. Instead he “reports” on a group of six grandmothers “calling themselves Good Ancestors immolating themselves in the lobby of ExxonMobil, capturing the attention of the world with their sacrificial witness. In the last year, there has been a steady stream of individual actions, most additional self-sacrifices.”

What Collins did not “report” on was massive, sustained, essentially nonviolent mass actions involving hundreds and sometimes thousands of people, for days and weeks on end, disrupting the operations of the fossil fuel industry or the banks which finance them.

These were the kinds of actions that took place in the repressive, racist USA South in the 50s and 60s. These actions broke the back of deeply-rooted Jim Crow segregation. Martin Luther King, Jr., a primary leader from the beginning of these actions, has written persuasively in Stride Toward Freedom, Why We Can’t Wait and Where Do We Go From Here, Chaos or Community?, about this tactic as THE tactic which, he learned from experience, has the power to bring about substantive and transformative change.

Collins’ book is an important contribution to our urgent, existential battle for the future. It is a good read, thought provoking, informative history and inspiring. Thank you Chuck CollinsRedditEmail

Ted Glick works with Beyond Extreme Energy and is president of 350NJ-Rockland. Past writings and other information, including about Burglar for Peace and 21st Century Revolution, two books published by him in 2020 and 2021, can be found at https://tedglick.com. He can be followed on Twitter at twitter.com/jtglick. Read other articles by Ted.

In Chicago the Left Embraces the Democrats and Celebrates Brandon Johnson’s Victory

by Stansfield Smith / April 15th, 2023

Brandon Johnson, a progressive black community activist, union organizer, and former teacher, won the Chicago mayoral election against Paul Vallas, the corporate Democrat opponent. Johnson’s victory expressed popular rejection of neoliberal privatization and respect for progressive unions, in particular the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Johnson was outspent two to one, but not out-organized, winning 52-48%. The election displayed once again the power and organizing skills of the CTU, and showed that people, when they are involved, can upend election predictions.

His campaign also showed how easily leftists can slide from opponents of the corporate rule of America with their two parties to fervent supporters of Democrats when a progressive or liberal candidate seems likely win an election. We saw this before with their enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders in 2016, then again in 2020, even after Bernie had kowtowed to the billionaires’ candidate. We see it with AOC, who is morphing from a socialist into a corporate shill. And before that, leftists had been enthralled with Mr Hope and Change, Barack Obama.

The “socialist” journal Jacobin enthused over Johnson’s mayoral victory: “A week ahead of the April 4 election, Johnson rallied alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders in Chicago, who declared, ‘The fundamental issue is: What side are you on? Are you on the side of working people or are you on the side of the speculators and the billionaires? And I know which side Brandon is on.’”

This is dishonest — both by Bernie and by the Jacobin — because the Democrats are on the side of the 1%, not the 99%. Bernie made this perfectly clear in his 1989 article “We Can’t Tail After the Democrats.”

We need a new, progressive political party in the U.S. because on almost every important issue the Democratic and Republican Parties, both controlled by Big Money, are indistinguishable…We need a new, progressive political movement in this country because the Democrats and Republicans are not only incapable of solving any of the major problems facing this country, they are not even prepared to discuss them…The boldness and clarity that we need to articulate can never be done through the compromised and corrupt Democratic Party — dominated by Big Money.

At his election victory celebration, Johnson declared, “Tonight is the beginning of a Chicago that truly invests in all of its people… a city where no one is too poor to live. There’s more than enough for everyone in the city of Chicago.” Certainly there is, but since the corporate CEOs run the city — a fact Johnson does not address – this will not happen.

How would working class left-wing activists view this election? They would explain that Chicago is owned by the business, banking and real estate elite. They would explain that elected officials are not the city’s decision-makers. It matters little what some politician says and promises while campaigning: even if s/he meant what was said, s/he does not call the shots. The corporate built and controlled political and economic structure does. They would explain that liberal Democrats like Brandon Johnson are obligated primarily to the Democratic Party chiefs and their billionaire bosses, not to the people who elected them. They would explain that even if a Brandon Johnson ran and won, not as a Democrat, but as a representative of an independent popular movement, his electoral victory would result in roadblocks placed in his way by the ruling class to thwart every progressive move his movement made.

Brandon Johnson, as mayor, plans to bring about expanded social programs to benefit the people funded by raising taxes on wealthy elite. His campaign website called for safe, vibrant neighborhoods, affordable housing, healthcare for all, fully funded schools. Any leftist knows it is naive, if not dishonest to propagate the view that these can be achieved under the neoliberal capitalist system we are trapped in.

The corporate owners of Chicago possess numerous weapons to housebreak a mayor, such as lowering the rating of municipal bonds, threatening to move their business out of the city, whipping of fear of crime (causing people to leave the city and undermining the city as a tourist destination — with $15 billion spent by tourists in 2017).

The power of the media, the banks, the police, the courts, the real estate companies, the billionaires’ corporations vastly outweighs that of Johnson’s supporters. Their Chicago City Council is aligned against him; a majority support Johnson’s pro-corporate neoliberal opponent, Paul Vallas, and able to vote down any unwelcome measure he proposes. Nor does Johnson have great influence in the Democratic Party machine.

A working class left-wing would explain that Brandon Johnson’s campaign promises must be okayed by Chicago’s business leaders to become a reality. Their power could only be countered by an ongoing mass movement of the people, who would have to fight hard for any substantial social change. Yet, as Bernie Sanders’ campaigns illustrated, the loosely organized movement behind him was disbanded after his campaign was over.

It is no surprise to any leftist that the owners of the corporations are the ruling class. Nevertheless, they seem forever willing to throw this ABC of Marxism out the window if some progressive Democrat is a serious contender for elected office, and act as if significant social and economic change can occur through the ballot box.

This scenario of leftists campaigning to elect some liberal or “socialist” Democrat, forever ending in some electoral defeat or capitulation to the Democratic bosses, repeats itself over and over. The Jacobin, “socialist” media for the Democratic Party, propagates this pipedream that the “people” can capture a power base in the Democratic Party, as if the people could capture a corporation. It declared this nonsense: “Chicago’s left scored its biggest victory in recent memory”; “a watershed moment for the progressive movement.”

Out of one side of their mouth leftists will proclaim, as Bernie did in 1989, that we need a working class party because the Democrats and Republicans are owned by the ruling rich. Out of the other they still hold that real social change can come through electing these people.

Marxists must be honest, must not mislead the people, must explain to people the class structure of US society, and the hard work we face if we want to end global warming and Martin Luther King’s three evils of society: war, racism and poverty,

Unions such as the CTU and other teachers unions, the SEIU, National Nurses United, did support and provide most of the funding for Brandon Johnson’s campaign. Jesse Jackson, Bernie Sanders, and the most progressive City Council person, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, actively supported his campaign. This did not make it a working class campaign, but a labor for the Democratic candidate campaign.

Let’s not overlook that his opponent, Paul Vallas, was endorsed by over 15 unions, and also built a base in the Black and Latino and Asian communities, one that included Bobbie Rush.

Johnson no longer calls for defunding the police. This change reflects the diversion of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement into a vote against Trump campaign. The ruling class has since been able to shift the sentiment of millions who demonstrated against police brutality. They had the police slack off in combating crime, crime rates rose, and fear of crime was whipped up. Now, just over two years after Blue Lives Matter was viewed as almost fascist, a common sentiment today is for more police.

Brandon did say, “Any speech or any effort to delegitimize Israel and its right to exist, that’s how I view antisemitism.” He is opposed to BDS. “The divestment movement is not aligned with my values,” he said. Rumor has it he privately apologized for these reactionary statements defending Israeli apartheid.

Brandon was congratulated by Obama, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. Chicago was rewarded with hosting the 2024 Democratic National Convention days after his victory. Thus, leftists for Johnson played a role in cloaking the Democratic convention in a faux progressive aura, where Biden or some other neoliberal warmonger will be nominated.

Leftists may pretend there are progressive Democrats in opposition to neoliberal Democrats, but Democratic elected officials see themselves as all belonging to the same tent, the same tent that includes Republicans. No leftist conjuring up “Our Revolution,” no Democratic Socialists, no United Working Families is going to alter that.FacebookTwitterReddit

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Stansfield Smith, Chicago ALBA Solidarity, is a long time Latin America solidarity activist, and presently puts out the AFGJ Venezuela Weekly. He is also the Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Read other articles by Stansfield.

Railroad Workers United: “We Would Never Concede Our Right to Strike”

Congressional progressives, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have defended their railroad strike vote by pointing to rank-and-file support. Here, Railroad Workers United clarifies the group has always unequivocally opposed denying railworkers their right to strike.

A view of Union Pacific Train and workers as the railroad covered with snow in Historic Downtown Truckee of California, United States, March 2, 2023.

 (Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

BY RON KAMINKOW

JACOBIN
04.15.2023

On April 11, 2023, Jacobin published a transcript of an interview by editor at large David Sirota with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In the context of a general discussion about differences between the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration, the subject of the vote to break the strike of the railroad workers came up.

In defending her votes — one to approve seven days of sick leave for railworkers and one to support the president’s bill to block the strike — Ocasio-Cortez states that she was acting on the wishes of Railroad Workers United (RWU) and other groups of railroad workers. She states in the interview, “When you look after the vote, folks like RWU were saying, ‘This is what we asked them to do.” Later she says, “Because, for example, with the rail vote, the only partners that I had leading up to that were railworkers. And if that’s what they asked us to do, then that’s what we did.”

But Ocasio-Cortez is clouding the reality of the situation by referring to “the vote,” when in fact there were two separate and distinctive votes. One bill proposed seven days of paid sick time, while the other bill blocked railworkers from striking; these bills were completely independent of one another.

Railroad Workers United cannot speak with any certainty as to what the official position of the various craft unions’ respective leaderships was on the question of blocking the strike. But RWU made crystal clear by our words and actions throughout contract negotiations that, while we were of course in full support of seven days of paid sick leave for railworkers, RWU would never be in favor of any legislation denying railroad workers our human right to withhold our labor when all else fails in our struggle for safe working conditions and dignity, regardless of whatever concessions may be dangled.


RWU was and is in favor of any legislation that would grant any relief to the barbaric working conditions we contend with — but we would never concede our right to strike. We thank Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the House of Representatives and the Senate for their votes in support of sick leave. But we are not happy at all with her or others in both chambers who voted to deny railroad workers the right to strike.

Throughout the contract fight that raged through fall of 2022, RWU made it clear from the start that we unequivocally opposed the failure of the Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) #250; that we opposed any tentative agreement based on the PEB recommendations; that we opposed the contract deal cut by Joe Biden and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh with the unions of the operating crafts (the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, and Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers–Transportation Division); that we urged all trainmen and engineers to vote no and proceed to a strike; and that when all was said and done and votes were cast, we supported the majority of rank-and-file railroad workers who had voted to strike (55 percent) to indeed engage in such activity upon the strike deadline in early December.

Meanwhile, throughout the entire contract debacle, the official leadership of the myriad unions thwarted efforts of their respective memberships to strike, and continually offered up unpopular tentative agreements. Then, when Biden declared he wanted emergency legislation to block the strike without amendments on a strict up-or-down vote, the union leadership said nothing. Perhaps it was within this context that Ocasio-Cortez got confused about who and which organizations supported what. In the future, we would hope that Ocasio-Cortez and other politicians contact RWU if and when they are interested in the official positions and statements of the organization.

CONTRIBUTOR
Ron Kaminkow is an organizer with Railroad Workers United.

The Trudeau Liberals Can’t Stop Themselves From Selling Arms to Antidemocratic Gulf States

In spite of the frequent lip service they pay to human rights and peace, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have yet to find an antidemocratic Gulf state to which they won’t sell arms. Qatar is the newest potential client being wooed for Canadian-made weapons of war.

BYALEX COSH

JACOBIN

04.15.2023

For years, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has whitewashed concerns about — and refused to terminate — a $14-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The Trudeau government is now actively working to secure yet another contract between a Canadian arms manufacturer and an antidemocratic Gulf state. This time the prospective buyer is Qatar.

As with the Saudi deal, the pending agreement with Qatar signals the Trudeau government’s prioritization of Canada’s military-industrial base over its purported concerns about human rights and progressive values. It is also yet another reminder that Canada’s geopolitical and military priorities are not motivated by concerns for advancing liberal democracy, despite lip service that Trudeau pays to that claimed objective whenever it is convenient.

Finally, the deal further belies the Trudeau government’s representation of itself as a reluctant bystander to the Saudi exports. Liberal ministers have repeatedly suggested that they wanted to find a way out of the deal, but lamented that they were hamstrung by the fact that killing it would carry the cost of the full value of the contract. If Trudeau truly cared about keeping Canadian-made weapons out of the hands of authoritarian states — never a credible proposition in the first place — then his government would not be actively lobbying for a new deal with a similarly antidemocratic regime.

The World Cup Visit

Ahead of his visit to the FIFA World Cup in Doha last year, International Development Minister Harjit Sajjan was instructed to lobby for a potential deal between the Canadian division of General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) — which exports light-armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia — and the Qatari military. In a briefing note prepared for a meeting with Qatar’s foreign affairs minister and deputy prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, Sajjan was told to explain that Canada was “pleased that GDLS is interested in working with the Qatari Military for the supply of light-armored vehicles (LAVs) as well as other opportunities.”

“This partnership would bring Canada and Qatar significant benefits,” the briefing note added. Canada “sincerely hope[s] to see this opportunity for cooperation between our countries realized.” Sajjan’s itinerary also indicates that the day before his meeting with Al-Thani, the Canadian minister attended a closed-door meeting with the Canadian Business Council in Qatar at the Canadian embassy, where he was expected to meet GDLS representatives. Further details about the LAV deal, including if and when it will be finalized, have not been disclosed.

Light-armored vehicles are recognized for their versatility by arms monitoring experts, and have been used by governments to quash domestic unrest, such as the Bahrain government during the 2011 and 2012 protests.

Arming Qatar

The revelation that this kind of deal has been in the works did not come as a surprise. Qatar was added to Canada’s Automatic Firearms Country Control List (AFCCL) in August 2022, suggesting that a major deal was under discussion, as reported by the Globe and Mail last December.

Qatar is undergoing a massive investment in its armed forces. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), arms imports to the Gulf state spiked by 311 percent between 2013 to 2017 and 2018 to 2022, making it the third-largest importer in the world between 2018 and 2022. Indeed, Sajjan’s briefing note ominously stated that Qatar’s military modernization is motivated in part by a desire to “develop comparable capabilities to western nations, especially for purposes of multi-national deployments and inter-operability.” This assessment reads like diplomatic speak for the type of foreign interventions that have led to massive bloodshed and destabilization in the region.

Qatar initially deployed one thousand troops to support Saudi Arabia’s murderous bombing campaign in Yemen, contributing to a war whose death toll resulted in an estimated 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021. Following a diplomatic row with the Saudis that emerged in 2017, Qatar withdrew its forces from Yemen, where the war now, thankfully, looks to be coming to an end. However, Qatar has a track record of meddling in other regional conflicts, such as in Libya and Syria.

In addition to its rising militarization, Qatar has a dire domestic human rights record. In particular, its poor treatment of migrant foreign workers came under scrutiny during the World Cup, with reforms that were promised ahead of the tournament failing to end the exploitation and abuse. According to Amnesty International, the Qatari state criminalizes same-sex relationships, stifles critical voices, and maintains laws that require women to seek permission from “male guardians” to make basic life decisions. Concerns about advancing human rights were absent in the list of objectives laid out in Sajjan’s strategic overview for his visit to Qatar.

Importantly, arms deals such as the proposed LAV agreement are not struck to simply bolster armories — Qatar already has a surfeit of international suppliers and weapons — and the profits of the arms industry. Such deals are also key to gaining political leverage and regional power projection. By pressing for such a deal, Canada is evidently seeking to strengthen its diplomatic ties with an authoritarian state in a region where past Canadian influence has helped fuel misery and violence.

The Saudi Deal

The pending deal with Qatar follows a similar and highly controversial agreement between GDLS and the Saudis. Despite Canada and Saudi Arabia being locked, at least publicly, in a diplomatic spat since 2018, the Canadian-made LAVs have continued to flow apace to the Saudi monarchy. As of last year, the value of exports to the kingdom reached hundreds of millions of dollars per month. In 2021, Saudi Arabia was by far Canada’s largest non-US arms export destination, with sales totaling $1.7 billion.

The LAV deal with Saudi Arabia was first arranged in 2014 under the watch of then prime minister Stephen Harper — who has shamelessly bragged that he is proud of having brokered the deal — but was given the final green light by the Trudeau government. A 2016 document explaining the Liberal government’s decision to go ahead with the deal stated that “these proposed exports are consistent with Canada’s defense and security interests in the Middle East.” The document further claimed there was no evidence to suggest that the LAVs would be used by the Saudis to commit human rights abuses, despite the kingdom’s dire humanitarian record and campaign in Yemen.

The document also stressed the size of GDLS’s industrial operations within Canada, stating that the company “anchors Canada’s defense industry cluster in southern Ontario, and supports a supply chain of over 500 Canadian firms.” But apart from the industrial value of the deal — and its bolstering of Canada’s arms industry for the specific benefit of supplying the Canadian Armed Forces — the document called Saudi Arabia “an important and stable ally” and even praised it for “countering instability in Yemen.”

In March 2018, the Trudeau government continued to defend the deal, with the prime minister himself stating that “our approach fully meets our national obligations and Canadian laws.” Five months later, public-facing relations between the two countries soured dramatically when then foreign minister Chrystia Freeland called on the Saudis to immediately release dissidents Samar and Raif Badawi from jail (a call which, it turned out, had been part of a longer push for their release behind the scenes). Despite an aggressive public reaction from the Saudis, however, the LAV deal was unaffected.

The Trudeau government came under even more pressure when the Saudi monarchy ordered the brutal assassination and dismemberment of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018. By this time, the prime minister had begun blaming the previous Conservative government for making it “very difficult to suspend or leave that contract,” even as he insisted that he was “looking for a way out” of the deal. Trudeau stated that he could not divulge details about the contract but hinted that “I do not want to leave Canadians holding a billion-dollar bill.”

The steep cost of terminating the contract became an oft-repeated talking point by Trudeau government ministers, even as they temporarily suspended new export permits for military goods to Saudi Arabia and announced a review of the existing deal in response to the killing of Khashoggi. GDLS itself, apparently spooked by mounting public criticism of the LAV deal, warned the Liberal government that canceling the agreement would cost billions in financial penalties and jobs.

As it turned out, GDLS had little to worry about. In 2019, a Global Affairs Canada briefing note for Freeland claimed that “officials found no credible evidence linking Canadian exports of military equipment or other controlled items to any human rights or humanitarian law violations committed by the Saudi government.” Despite acknowledging reports that older Canadian-made LAVs had been deployed along the Saudi-Yemini border, the note claimed: “There are no confirmed reports of Canadian-made military equipment being deployed by KSA on Yemeni territory.” This statement would be rebutted by arms monitoring group Project Ploughshares and Amnesty International.

It’s Not a Lie If We Cross Our Fingers

In 2021, those groups published a report that picked apart the Trudeau government’s “flawed analysis” of the deal and accused it of violating international law by arming the Saudi monarchy. “There is persuasive evidence that weapons exported from Canada to KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia], including LAVs [light-armored vehicles] and sniper rifles, have been diverted for use in the war in Yemen,” the report found. The Trudeau government, the report’s authors explained, was using an intentionally narrow focus to study the risks of the deal that “completely misse[d] the mark on Canada’s obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty” (which Canada acceded to after Khashoggi’s death).

However, more pressing concerns appeared to be at play in the Trudeau government’s decision-making. Notably, the 2019 briefing note stressed:

Canada-KSA bilateral tensions and the moratorium on the issuance of new permits are having a negative impact on Canadian exporters … Engagement by departmental officials with 20 companies that have a history of exporting to KSA suggests that approximately $2 billion in trade has been affected since August 2018.

In April 2020, with public attention conveniently diverted by the chaos of the pandemic’s first wave, the Trudeau government lifted its temporary freeze on new permits for military exports to Saudi Arabia and announced it had renegotiated some of the terms of the GDLS deal. At this point, the Liberal government revealed for the first time that it would be responsible for the full $14-billion value of the deal if it terminated the agreement. This added a concrete figure to the well-rehearsed talking point that portrayed Trudeau as having his hands economically tied on the matter. And so the exports continued.

The pending deal with Qatar, likely to be the next authoritarian destination for a large chunk of Canada’s arms export industry, flies in the face of Trudeau’s cheerful branding of Canada as a world champion for human rights. But it also counters his government’s claims that it was reluctantly bound by the risk of steep economic costs if it canceled the deal with Saudi Arabia. Just like the Saudi deal, the push for a new deal with Qatar shows that the demands of the arms industry’s profitability trump respect for democracy and any desire to end human suffering.

CONTRIBUTOR
Alex Cosh is the managing editor of the Maple. He lives in Calgary, Alberta.

Rashida Tlaib Is Right: The Attempt to Extradite Julian Assange Is a Huge Threat to Press Freedom

Rashida Tlaib is leading a group in Congress calling on Joe Biden to halt extradition proceedings against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. The prosecution of Assange should worry anyone who believes in freedom of the press.

Rashida Tlaib attends a House Financial Services Committee 

hearing on March 29, 2023. 

(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

BY BEN BURGIS

JACOBIN
04.14.2023

On Tuesday, a group of House members led by Michigan’s democratic socialist representative, Rashida Tlaib, put out a letter calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to drop the Justice Department’s indictment of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange. Tlaib and her colleagues point out that the US effort to extradite a foreign journalist for publishing classified documents represents a serious threat to freedom of the press.

Anyone who cares about democracy should support their call to drop the charges.

The Core of the Issue

Many people who might otherwise care about press freedom are reluctant to defend Assange because of aspects of his politics or his history. Most seriously, in 2010, he was accused of sexual assault in Sweden. The charges were never proven, and the investigation was ultimately dropped, but I can understand why a question mark hangs over his head in the minds of many observers.

The crucial point, though, is that whatever is or isn’t true about these other allegations, none of it has any bearing on this case. Prosecuting him for engaging in investigative journalism is a disturbing assault on press freedom in the United States and around the world.

Assange isn’t even a US citizen. If he can be prosecuted for publishing information that the US government would prefer to keep secret, any journalist anywhere in the world would have to think twice about exposing war crimes for fear of ending up on a one-way trip to the United States. The chilling effect on the global media would be profound.

Which is, of course, exactly the point.

Julian Assange and the “New York Times Problem”

In the letter, the House members point out that “what Mr. Assange is accused of doing” in “publishing truthful information” about Guantanamo Bay and US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan is “legally indistinguishable from what papers like the New York Times do,” and that the Obama administration decided not to indict Assange for precisely that reason. “The Trump administration, which brought these charges against Mr. Assange, was notably less concerned about press freedom.”

If anything, that comparison is misleadingly generous to Obama — although in a way that ultimately reinforces Tlaib and her cosigners’ point. The Obama administration’s record on press freedom was abysmal. Yet even Obama was too squeamish about the democratic implications to indict Assange.As the Associated Press noted in a fact check of one of Obama’s statements in 2018, the Obama administration used “extraordinary actions to block the flow of information to the public,” using “the 1917 Espionage Act with unprecedented vigor, prosecuting more people under that law for leaking sensitive information to the public than all previous administrations combined.” These efforts included many instances of going after journalists and media organizations (including the Associated Press itself) to try to clamp down on leaked information.

Still, there was a line that the Obama administration was reluctant to cross. It hated Assange, who had repeatedly exposed the misdeeds of the US war machine; then vice president Joe Biden said that Assange was “closer to being a hi-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers.” (The actual leaker of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, strongly disagreed with that assessment and is a staunch supporter of freeing Assange.) But the administration ultimately decided not to indict Assange under the Espionage Act because of what the administration internally referred to as “the New York Times problem.”

As much as it deplored leaks, the Obama administration knew that there was no way of legally differentiating what Assange did from what any investigative journalists does. Welcoming, encouraging, and publishing information that governments or other powerful actors want to remain secret is at the heart of what investigative journalism is, and any legal theory used to prosecute Assange could be used against the Times or any other mainstream news outlet that exposes the secrets or lies of people in power.

Trump decided that he was fine with setting a democracy-flouting precedent. And the Biden administration is picking up right where Trump left off.

Treating a News Publisher Like Hannibal Lecter

Last year, when I interviewed Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on my podcast, he told me a small but revealing story about visiting Assange in prison. Žižek had a container of coffee between himself and Assange on the table. He picked it up, took a sip, and set it back down without replacing the cap. Immediately, a prison guard rushed over to tell him that this was a security risk — he had to keep the cap on. Such a dangerous prisoner, after all, might decide to splash hot coffee in the face of one of his friends and supporters. Perhaps Assange should be wheeled around in the same contraption as Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs to make sure he doesn’t randomly jump on people and start tearing gobs of flesh out of their necks.

It’s worth remembering that the heinous crime for which Assange is facing extradition to the United States is . . . publishing information embarrassing to the US government. As Tlaib and her cosigners point out in their letter to Garland, Assange’s prosecution “marks the first time in U.S. history that a publisher of truthful information has been indicted under the Espionage Act.” This could lead to the prosecution of outlets like the New York Times or the Washington Post when they do their job and publish information the government wants to shield from the public — or, “just as dangerous for democracy, they may refrain from publishing such stories for fear of prosecution.”

That last point is the most important one. Citizens of what’s supposed to be a democracy need to know what their government is up to so that they can have their say. The more effectively that government keeps elements of its foreign policy secret from the public, the more it turns that core premise of democratic government into a bad joke.

As usual, Rashida Tlaib is absolutely right.

CONTRIBUTOR
Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.

Inglorious Inertia: The Albanese Government and Julian Assange

by Binoy Kampmark / April 3rd, 2023

The sham that is the Assange affair, a scandal of monumental proportions connived in by the AUKUS powers, shows no signs of abating.  Prior to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese assuming office in Australia, he insisted that the matter dealing with the WikiLeaks publisher would be finally resolved.  It had, he asserted, been going on for too long.

Since then, it is very clear, as with all matters regarding US policy, that Australia will, if not agree outright with Washington, adopt a constipated, non-committal position.  “Quiet diplomacy” is the official line taken by Albanese and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, a mealy-mouthed formulation deserving of contempt.  As Greens Senator David Shoebridge remarks, “‘quiet diplomacy’ to bring Julian Assange home by the Albanese Government is a policy of nothing.  Not one meeting, phone call or letter sent.”

Kellie Tranter, a tireless advocate for Assange, has done sterling work uncovering the nature of that position through Freedom of Information requests over the years.  “They tell the story – not the whole story – of institutionalised prejudgment, ‘perceived’ rather than ‘actual’ risks, and complicity through silence.”

The story is a resoundingly ugly one.  It features, for instance, stubbornness on the part of US authorities to even disclose the existence of a process seeking Assange’s extradition from the UK, to the lack of interest on the part of the Australian government to pursue direct diplomatic and political interventions.

Former Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop exemplified that position in signing off on a Ministerial Submission in February 2016 recommending that the Assange case not be resolved; those in Canberra were “unable to intervene in the due process of another’s country’s court proceedings or legal matters, and we have full confidence in UK and Swedish judicial systems”.  Given the nakedly political nature of the blatant persecution of the WikiLeaks founder, this was a confidence both misplaced and disingenuous.

The same position was adopted by the Australian government to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), which found that same month that Assange had been subject to “different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth prison which was followed by house arrest and his confinement at the Ecuadorean embassy.”  The Working Group further argued that Assange’s “safety and physical integrity” be guaranteed, that “his right to freedom of movement” be respected, and that he enjoy the full slew of “rights guaranteed by the international norms on detention.”

At the time, such press outlets as The Guardian covered themselves in gangrenous glory in insisting that Assange was not being detained arbitrarily and was merely ducking the authorities in favour of a “publicity stunt”.  The conduct from Bishop and her colleagues did little to challenge such assertions, though the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade did confirm in communications with Tranter in June 2018 that the government was “committed to engaging in good faith with the United Nations Human Rights Council and its mechanisms, including the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention.”  Splendid inertia beckoned.

The new Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Stephen Smith, has kept up that undistinguished, even disgraceful tradition: he has offered unconvincing, lukewarm support for one of Belmarsh Prison’s most notable detainees.  As the ABC reports, he expressed pleasure “that in the due course of next week or so he’s agreed that I can visit him in Belmarsh Prison.” (This comes with the usual qualification: that up to 40 offers of “consular” support had been previously made and declined by the ungrateful publisher.)

The new High Commissioner is promising little.  “My primary responsibility will be to ensure his health and wellbeing and to inquire as to his state and whether there is anything that we can do, either with respect to prison authorities or to himself to make sure that his health and safety and wellbeing is of the highest order.”

Assange’s health and wellbeing, which has and continues to deteriorate, is a matter of court and common record.  No consular visit is needed to confirm that fact.  As with his predecessors, Smith is making his own sordid contribution to assuring that the WikiLeaks founder perishes in prison, a victim of ghastly process.

As for what he would be doing to impress the UK to reverse the decision of former Home Secretary Priti Patel to extradite the publisher to the US, Smith was painfully predictable.  “It’s not a matter of us lobbying for a particular outcome.  It’s a matter of me as the High Commissioner representing to the UK government as I do, that the view of the Australian government is twofold.  It is: these matters have transpired for too long and need to be brought to a conclusion, and secondly, we want to, and there is no difficulty so far as UK authorities are concerned, we want to discharge our consular obligations.”

Former Australian Senator Rex Patrick summed up the position rather well by declaring that Smith would be far better off, on instructions from Prime Minister Albanese, pressing the current Home Secretary Suella Braverman to drop the whole matter.  Even better, Albanese might just do the good thing and push US President Joe Biden and his Attorney-General Merrick Garland to end the prosecution.

Little can be expected from the latest announcement.  Smith is a man who has made various effusive comments about AUKUS, an absurd, extortionately costly security pact appropriately described as a war-making arrangement.  The Albanese government, having placed Australia ever deeper into the US military orbit, is hardly likely to do much for a publisher who exposed the war crimes and predations of the Imperium.FacebookTwitterReddit

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.

Karl Marx Knew That the Struggle for Reforms Was Part of the Struggle for Socialism

The tendency of some modern-day Marxists to pit reform against revolution is diametrically opposed to the vision of Karl Marx himself.

Assembly line workers inside the Ford Motor Company factory at Dearborn, Michigan. 

(Hulton Archive / Getty Images)


BYSETH ACKERMAN

JACOBIN
 04.14.2023


Last week, the New Left Review‘s Dylan Riley published a brief, barbed polemic against those adherents of “neo-Kautskyite” socialism — a tendency with which this magazine is reputed to be associated — who cling to illusory visions of new New Deals, “green or otherwise.”

Riley was categorical: “No socialist should advocate an ‘industrial policy’ of any sort.” Any future attempted New Deals will prove “self-defeating.” And those who don’t see this have fallen victim to a fatal error: they’ve failed to reckon with “the structural logic of capital.”
Logicians of Capital

Riley’s admonition is a reminder of the strange itinerary that “the structural logic of capital” has traced over the past century and a half. Karl Marx was the great pioneer of the concept of course. His lifelong intellectual project was to uncover the system’s inner “laws of motion” and then to ask: If you have a society propelled by such inner dynamics, in what direction is it likely to go?

His answers to that question almost always involved some mechanism by which capitalism could be shown to be undermining itself or preparing the ground for socialism: Competition bred ever-bigger factories that required ever-more sophisticated planning of production. Capital accumulation gathered up scattered proletarians from the global countryside and concentrated them in crowded factory towns where they could learn of their common interests and organize against the system. And so on.

For Marx, reform was another of these dialectical boomerangs. Capitalism could not stop breeding movements to reform capitalism. These movements had the effect of strengthening the political muscles and sense of self-efficacy of the working class, and this, for Marx, was yet another example of the system putting shovels in the hands of its own gravediggers.


The leading instance of such reforms in Marx’s writings was the English Ten Hours Bill (in its several iterations), the object of a great working-class movement in the era of Owenism and Chartism — “a thirty-years’ struggle fought with admirable perseverance,” as Marx recounted in his 1864 inaugural address to the International Workingmen’s Association.

And he was unequivocal about the outcome: the reform legislation limiting the length of the working day had been a smashing success. “The immense physical, moral, and intellectual benefits hence accruing to the factory operatives, half-yearly chronicled in the reports of the inspectors of factories, are now acknowledged on all sides.”

But besides all this, the movement yielded another great benefit.

Throughout the struggle for ten hours, a constant line of attack by bourgeois writers opposed to the reform had been that, if enacted and enforced, the legislation, by driving up production costs, would spell economic calamity for British industry — harming the very factory hands it was designed to protect.

In other words, though they may not have used the phrase, the bourgeois opponents of the Ten Hours Bill were appealing to the structural logic of capital to demonstrate the folly of the reform.

For Marx, one of the great achievements of the ten-hours agitation — on a par with the actual improvements in the health and happiness of the workers that resulted — was precisely how it discredited that kind of critique, and how it vindicated the idea of “social production controlled by social foresight” even within the bourgeois mode of production:

There was something else to exalt the marvelous success of this workingmen’s measure. Through their most notorious organs of science, such as Dr. Ure, Professor Senior, and other sages of that stamp, the middle class had predicted, and to their heart’s content proved, that any legal restriction of the hours of labor must sound the death knell of British industry, which, vampirelike, could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood, too. . . .

This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labor raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class.

Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.

If any “structural logic of capital” was at work in the saga of the ten-hours movement, for Marx, it lay in capital’s endemic tendency to generate reform movements in opposition to itself — not, as the middle-class “sages of science” had claimed, in condemning any reform measure to futility.
The Logic of Capital, Vol. 1

If we fast-forward a century or so, however, we find these intellectual positions drastically reconfigured.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the political economies of the industrialized world had been transformed by forms of state intervention that Marx and his comrades in the International Workingmen’s Association could scarcely have imagined. Wide swathes of industry were nationalized. Wage schedules were set in national agreements. Capital-controlled banking systems were under the thumb of national central banks, now accountable to finance ministries that answered to parliaments elected by universal suffrage. Governments committed to full employment held jobless rates to levels once thought impossible.

Intellectuals on the right wing of the socialist and labor movements — neo-revisionists like the British author and politician Anthony Crosland — began claiming that in this new era of full employment and uninhibited economic management, capitalism had ceased to be capitalism and the workers’ movement no longer needed to push for any deeper transformation beyond an endless series of piecemeal reforms.

It was in this context, in the ’60s and ’70s, that self-consciously “revolutionary” writers on the Left seized on the notion of a “structural logic of capital” as a weapon in the fight against the new revisionism.

“If the capitalist mode of production can ensure, with or without government intervention, continual expansion and full employment, then the most important objective argument in support of revolutionary socialist theory breaks down,” wrote David Yaffe, a key figure in the “capital logic” current of intellectual Marxism, in a 1973 article.

It was thus vital to furnish arguments showing why such a stabilization was impossible, and this was done — in works by such writers as Paul Mattick and Roman Rosdolsky — by plucking out of relative obscurity a suggestion that could be found in scattered passages of Marx’s voluminous economic writings but had, until then, only occasionally been the focus of sustained consideration from Marxists: the idea of a lawlike tendency for the profit rate to fall.

The great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century defenders of Marxist orthodoxy, most prominently Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, had been dismissive of falling-profit-rate theories on the rare occasions when they felt the need to acknowledge them at all, and certainly did not believe that such a tendency could be granted a central role in Marxist crisis theory. (Luxemburg was especially biting in her disdain for the idea. Responding to an enthusiast of the theory who had reviewed her Accumulation of Capital in a German socialist newspaper, she wrote: “There is still some time to pass before capitalism collapses because of the falling rate of profit — roughly until the sun burns out.”)

But since the 1970s, the canonical status of falling-profit theory in the corpus of orthodox Marxism has become a kind of “invented tradition.” Its centrality in the pantheon of Marxist ideas, though widely seen as primordial, is no more than a few decades old, and its function has always been ideological: to demonstrate the futility, perversity, or jeopardy of social democratic reforms.

I’ll save for a subsequent article a more thorough discussion of the various theories of falling profit — including the novel version advanced by the UCLA economic historian Robert Brenner, which has become something of a house theory at the New Left Review over the past twenty-five years.

Suffice it to say that when the New Left Review invokes it to warn that the “structural logic of capital” will somehow render futile measures to promote green technologies, due to a “massive exacerbation of the problems of overcapacity on a world scale,” it illustrates the rhetorical dilemma of an “anti-reformist” left whose struggle against anachronism has forced it to stand Marx on his head.

Seth Ackerman is an editor at Jacobin.

Martin Wolf Knows That Capitalism Is in Crisis, but He Can’t Explain Why

Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, recognizes that the neoliberal model he once celebrated is in deep crisis. But Wolf can’t get to the heart of the problems with contemporary capitalism or offer a meaningful solution for them.

Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, speaking in Washington, DC

(Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

BY GEORGE KEREVAN

04.15.2023

Jacobin 

Review of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolf (Penguin Random House, 2023).

The front cover of Martin Wolf’s new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, is emblazoned with a red flying wedge straight out of an early Soviet-era constructivist poster. However, the book’s author is more interested in saving capitalism than burying it.

Wolf, the chief commentator of the Financial Times on economics, is arguably one of the most influential media defenders of the neoliberal order, and certainly the most nuanced. He sets out his case in an intellectual doorstop — nearly five hundred pages long — of the kind made popular by Thomas Piketty.

Yet verbosity is not always proof of a sound argument, and that proves to be the case here. Wolf is a brilliant journalist and commentator, but his attempt at outlining a blueprint for a Neoliberalism 2.0 gets lost in its own labyrinthine contradictions.

Fruits of Neoliberalism

To give Wolf his due, he knows something has gone very wrong with the global order. Instead of delivering “prosperity and steady progress,” the democratic capitalism he defends has generated “soaring inequality, dead-end jobs, and macroeconomic instability.”

As someone whose Jewish parents barely escaped the Holocaust, with many family members who did not, Wolf is genuinely worried that this economic failure may be fermenting a dangerous populist reaction against liberal democracy:

People expect the economy to deliver reasonable levels of prosperity and opportunity to themselves and their children. When it does not . . . they become frustrated and resentful. . . . Predictably, they frequently blame this disappointment on outsiders — minorities at home and foreigners.

As a good liberal, Wolf spends time undermining many of the standard populist tropes, deploying a mass of empirical data. Although this aspect of the book sometimes offers more quantity than quality, he does see off the Trumpian–Brexiteer lie that immigration is the principal destroyer of Western blue-collar jobs.Martin Wolf’s attempt at outlining a blueprint for a Neoliberalism 2.0 gets lost in its own labyrinthine contradictions.

Wolf shows that there is in fact scant evidence of immigrants reducing wage levels — largely because they play the role of complements rather than substitutes in metropolitan labor markets. Studies also indicate that the net fiscal contribution of immigrants tends to be positive because they come to find work.

Wolf is willing to countenance the possibility that mass immigration, when confined to already densely populated areas, can produce “congestion costs.” However, the reality is that the decay of urban centers in the United States and UK has nothing to do with mass immigration and everything to do with the flight of the middle class to the suburbs. The resulting contraction of the local fiscal base leads to the underfunding of education and infrastructure.

Populism and Class Power

There is a clue here to the weakness in Wolf’s overall thesis. Basically, he is blaming the threat to liberal democracy jointly on the rage of the dispossessed traditional working class and on the ideological “wokeism” of young professionals whose standard of living has flatlined in the era after the 2008 financial crisis.

According to Wolf, enraged blue-collar workers have turned to Donald Trump and Nigel Farage while the naive youth have turned to Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Both sides are united in wanting to see off liberal democracy and free trade in favor of demagogic nationalism, authoritarianism, and economic protectionism. To save the liberal order, he argues, we need to reinvigorate democratic institutions and reboot economic growth, giving everyone a share in the capitalist pie.If the system failed to deliver, which it did, that was the result of conscious choices by the ruling elite.

Yet instead of blaming the old working class for their political stupidity — which is actually what Wolf is implying — or the youth for their left-wing naivety, we need to restore class and class power as the key component of the present crisis. This, of course, is the ingredient that is absent from Wolf’s approach.

The missing actors in Wolf’s worldview are the strata of middle-class professionals in Western society who have appropriated the massive economic gains generated in the globalist expansion of the period between roughly 1990 to 2008. These are the beneficiaries of neoliberalism and its intellectual exponents, of whom Martin Wolf is ideologue in chief. If the system failed to deliver, which it did, that was the result of conscious choices by the ruling elite.

Winners and Losers

Globalization has profoundly altered the structure and nature of this Western ruling elite. The process has resulted in a massive excess of surplus value beyond what can be productively invested and valorized. This excess has underwritten the emergence of a superlayer of unnecessary functionaries, pseudomanagers, financial-service employees, influencers, academic ideologues, luxury-consumption providers, and pampered cultural workers.

The members of this layer are collectively referred to as the New Petty Bourgeois (following Nicos Poulantzas) or the New Professional Middle Class. At one end (for example, computer programmers and IT engineers), this social layer clearly merges into the scientific proletariat. At the upper end, however, among financial executives, hedge fund managers, and so on, it is clearly bourgeois.Wolf’s analysis lacks the deeper sociopolitical apparatus required to explain the rise and emergent crisis of the Western neoliberal order.

In the mass, this parasitical group has all the unstable characteristics of any middle social layer: individualistic, narcissistic, and politically vacillating. Its direct interests lie with maintaining the neoliberal order.

Unfortunately, Wolf’s analysis lacks the deeper sociopolitical apparatus required to explain the rise and emergent crisis of the Western neoliberal order, particularly the power structure and vested interests that sustain it. He substitutes a rather long-in-the-tooth Anglo-Saxon empiricism for his lack of theory. But his facts end up marooned.

Rentier Capitalism

For instance, Wolf happily quotes a McKinsey Global Institute report, which shows that between 2005 and 2008, around 70 percent of all households in the high-income economies had a flat or falling real income (before any redistribution through state transfers). In other words, the neoliberal order at its height produced zero improvement for most people’s lives. On the other hand, the share of pre-tax national income going to the top 10 percent of the population in America increased by a whole nine percentage points between 1981 and 2008, to a staggering 44 percent of the total.

This is, of course, devastating evidence of a rapacious Western elite strata plundering the gains of technology and free trade to amass wealth on a scale not seen in previous capitalist cycles. But Wolf is more concerned — threatened perhaps? — by the populist, plebeian reaction to this development than he is interested in pursuing an investigation of its cause.The neoliberal order at its height produced zero improvement for most people’s lives.

True, he devotes a chapter to the rise of what he calls “rentier capitalism.” Wolf explains that rising global savings have combined with the concentration in incomes to produce a glut of cash seeking risky investment outlets in the financial sector. As Wolf ruefully notes:

This explosion of financial activity has not done much for productivity growth . . . much of the most highly rewarded activity of the sector consists of what are likely to be . . . zero-sum activities: hedging against volatility created by financial activity itself; invention of complex derivatives that conceal embedded risks; and outright gambling.

He concludes by arguing that the financial sector “wastes both human and real resources” and is “in large part a rent-extraction machine.” Karl Marx could not have put it so succinctly (and Wolf is fond of quoting Marx and even Leon Trotsky).

At no point, however, does Wolf suggest that this parasitical financial edifice has directly given rise to vested interests that are determined to ensure their own survival and that of the system itself, no matter how dysfunctional. Indeed, after the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Wolf could still write disingenuously in the Financial Times that it “may be amusing that those shrieking for a rescue this time have been the libertarians of Silicon Valley.” Yet he backed the extension of US deposit insurance to every SVB depositor, no matter how large. The system protects itself.

Myths of Free Trade

This myopia leaves Wolf in the position of implicitly criticizing anyone who opposes the system. He sees no future in “populist” economics that eschew free trade and free movement of capital and spends a lot of time bashing Trump’s protectionism, suggesting it will lead the US toward a sort of Latin American–style banana republic.

If that is the case, then why has Joe Biden kept most of the Trump-era prohibitions on trade with China and even extended them? Why has a supposedly orthodox American president introduced the biggest peacetime industrial subsidies, in a bid to repatriate offshore microprocessor production back to the continental United States? Could it possibly be that the high-tech liberals who fund the Democratic Party are just as interested in protecting their markets and supply chains as a folksy populist? (And that includes those SVB depositors.)Wolf’s section on ‘what went wrong’ is devoid of any reference to the bank-saving austerity policies which fell most heavily on the poor.

The problem with Wolf’s vision of Liberal Goodies and Populist Baddies is laid bare when it comes to the role that government austerity policies since 2008 have played in depressing living standards and household incomes. Indeed, you can search in vain through Wolf’s voluminous index for the very word “austerity.”

His section on “what went wrong” is devoid of any reference to the bank-saving austerity policies which fell most heavily on the poor. Nor does he mention the quantitative easing by central banks which effectively printed money to subsidize shareholder wealth. The loss of prosperity — or even hope for prosperity — that Wolf blames for the rise of authoritarian populism was no accident. It was the result of austerity and quantitative easing policies that were employed after 2008 to cope with the aftermath of the speculative bubble.

Busking While Rome Burns

Since he avoids discussing the class causes of the failure of neoliberalism, making populism a scapegoat instead, we should not be surprised that Wolf’s solutions to the “crisis of democratic capitalism” are misdirected as well as banal. In fact, he spends rather more effort on criticizing left or leftish solutions than in putting forward his own.

For example, he offers a long, ill-tempered critique of the notion of a universal basic income (UBI) as an antidote to poverty and social insecurity. According to Wolf, a UBI would be “inescapably wasteful” and “unaffordable” (unlike bank bailouts). At best, Wolf offers a reheated and half-hearted form of Keynesianism as a way to shore up aggregate demand, although he delivers some characteristic rants against Modern Monetary Theory or the idea of printing our way out of poverty.

Of course, none of this confronts the central weakness of a system based on endless capital accumulation: What do you do when you run out of ways to invest that return the average or better rate of profit? For Wolf, the word “planning” is anathema.Wolf spends rather more effort on criticizing left or leftish solutions than in putting forward his own.

When it comes to political reform, Wolf pays homage to the usual suspects like better civic education, devolution to local government, and rooting out corruption. He is on more interesting ground when he suggests replacing the present Western representative model with a hybrid electoral system.

According to Wolf, this would involve three chambers: a directly elected, freely contested legislature; an appointed chamber (“House of Merit”) that advises and has the power of delay, like the House of Lords in the UK; and a “House of the People” chosen by lot (like a jury) with a power of delay and the right to initiate binding, popular referendums on any subject. The idea would be to reduce the influence of special interests and revive popular engagement with politics.

Yet one can’t help thinking that Wolf is being disingenuous. The possibility of anything this complicated or radical being introduced anywhere is zero. He is busking intellectually because he has no real practical alternative to the present situation.

Out of Ideas

From Israel to Hungary and from the United States to the UK, populists are using voter-suppression tactics to strengthen their electoral position. Meanwhile, the ruling neoliberal elite is exploiting its media control, access to personal data, and lobbying power to make democracy a controlled game in which the political agenda and potential solutions are circumscribed to the “reality” of capitalism and its needs. Capitalist democracy has become a hollow shell while the populists are bent on knocking down the remnants.

Wolf is right to worry about the possible return of the jackboot and the concentration camp. But he cannot recognize that popular disenchantment with capitalist democracy will not be cured by introducing more such democracy, which will by definition exclude the interests of the mass of the population. If we are going to think the unthinkable, then we should remember that we now possess the social media tools to revive the stalled Marxist project of abolishing the state itself and introducing direct democracy.Capitalist democracy has become a hollow shell while the populists are bent on knocking down the remnants.

In his forgotten past, Wolf was a member of the youth section of the British Labour Party, the Labour Party Young Socialists, which was then under the influence of an assortment of Trotskyist groups. Today he dismisses the idea of “socialist democracy” as a chimera: “Such a combination of economic and political power will end up, sooner or later, like the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro.”

For Wolf, the only possible world system is the neoliberal model he has preached for and defended in the pages of the Financial Times. Twenty years ago, Wolf wrote a book entitled Why Globalization Works. This latest work is his mea culpa. But far from being an intellectual tour de force, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism reveals that Martin Wolf has run out of ideas.

CONTRIBUTOR
George Kerevan is a former member of the British parliament who served on its oversight committee for banking and bank regulation. He is on the board of the Scottish antiestablishment website CONTER.