Tongue In Cheek?

A report in the news that scientists are seriously discussing amelioratives for global warming. Since we can't seem to win our Leader's attention to the problem and no one can think of a way to cut back on China's growth, some thought is now being given to learning to live with the problem. Umbrellas in space, "tinkering" with the clouds, "trick" the ocean. I realize we can't expect people to give up their SUVs or their air conditioning. And perhaps these "reformists" are right. We can't eliminate illegal drugs so we learn to live with a carousel of injustice: we keep the jails full, only the bodies change. Hey, that even provides employment. As with burglars and terrorists, just what would these beer-bellied rednecks do for a living if they couldn't become security guards? But I think the proposals for study -- these are ideas from academics so, of course, they need study -- are far too timid. My proposal has already been studied and it has welcome side effects: Nuclear Winter.

Nuclear Winter is guaranteed to lower the temperature, much like an ice age. We even have records and journals that tell us about the year without a summer:1816. The United States survived, and look where we are today. Just think what massive, vaporizing explosions, heavy cloud cover with dust and soot blocking that sunlight along with toxic gases and radiation, just think of the problems that might solve. Now I realize that some might worry about what would happen to us here in our own homeland, where one day perhaps the grass itself will grow red, white and blue from teratogenic changes. The nice thing about thermonuclear war today is that no enemy can challenge us. We are IT! Check out this and for the religious folks, one of the authors teaches at a religious university! Our land has a fine history of figuring out solutions to problems. Centuries ago we were considered a nation of tinkerers, or engineers. Give us a problem and we can solve it.

Over 40 years ago, Herman Kahn, a physicist at the Rand Corporation, wrote On Thermonuclear War, that laid out the details of using the H-bomb and surviving. His ideas molded our nuclear strategy and they still do. A contemporaneous reviewer of that book, James Newman, wrote: "This is a moral tract on mass murder: how to plan it, how to commit it, how to get away with it, how to justify it." We are killing people left and right in Iraq, thinking about it with regard to Iran and North Korea, and, as I suspect and have written, have it in the playbook for Russia. With our "full-spectrum dominance" we really can get away with it. It would do wonders for overpopulation, oil depletion, global warming. I think it's way overdue for us, a nation of doers, to dump our squeamishness, our lip service to morality, and get down to business, the business of saving the world. As a US general put it during Viet Nam: We had to destroy the village to save it. Or as Randy Newman sang in Political Science: "They all hate us anyhow so let's drop the big one now."

Does Capitalism Cause War ?

In my previous entry I linked to an article that was published on The Nation's website. There are some who believe that the eventual US pullout from Viet Nam had more to do with a disgruntled business sector than to anti-war protests. And it is possible that the Decider has managed to lose his biggest backers as well over the bungling in Iraq. The piece referenced above is remarkable in its simplicity and forthrightness. Here's a taste:

It is true that sectors of the economy can profit from war in certain circumstances, but Wall Street really doesn't like war--at least not the one now raging in Iraq, which is beginning to look like a write-off. The defense industry does like military expenditures. And US capitalists in general do appreciate the role of a robust military budget in bolstering the dollar as the ultimate reserve currency, in assuring that the rules of global finance are favorable to our interests and in protecting access to petroleum products. But we really do not like uncertainty. We like an environment we think we understand, one in which a return- on-capital analysis can be based on reliable assumptions of a predictable level of risk.

Now that is very straightforward and pretty much encapsulates the left's historical critique of capitalist economies and their governments. The interesting thing is that capitalism's backers always portray investors as gamblers engaged in an egocentric, Darwinian struggle to survive and thrive: competition. Anyone who actually follows business news knows that isn't true. From the Savings and Loan scandal to Long Term Capital Management to cost-plus Pentagon contracts to the "risky" pharmaceutical industry (how does a "risky" business always manage to turn in the best profits in America?) to monopolies like Microsoft, capitalists do all they can to guarantee profitable returns and government is the guarantor of last resort. Or to play with a Trumanism: the buck doesn't stop here; the bucks are handed out here. (If you live in an American city it is likely that your tax dollars, among other things, fund professional sports arenas.) That's one of the jobs of lobbyists. As with Vegas, what's gambling on one side of the table is a calculated business on the other. It's fine for citizens to pay the costs of their mistakes or misfortunes but one certainly can't expect businessmen to suffer. Suffering is for suckers.

So the business sector has become disheartened with Bush's Iraq policy, not because they dislike war but they don't like losing and the rampant incompetence about Iraq looks to Wall Street like losing. If the adventure had gone swimmingly all investors would have been on board, particularly those in the energy sector (Bush's and Cheney's home base) with all that oil and gas practically crying out for American domination. But businessmen are in a bit of a pickle: we have a consumption crisis. Companies never have enough customers and investment bankers search every nook and cranny for profitable places to invest. Even the supposedly robust economy is a bit of an illusion. To quote again:

There remains, of course, the problem of too many dollars chasing too few deals, a fact reflected in corporations massively buying back their own stock, paying down debt and paying cash for acquisitions where possible. Nevertheless, although there are none of the huge capital-eating growth industries we have liked to finance in the past, such as railroads, automobiles or telecommunications, we have invented other ways, such as derivatives, securitizations and proprietary trading, of tailoring returns on capital to the risk involved.

That was the essence of the dot com boom and bust. The wealthy are awash in money and need a place to plunk it down. You can check out the system's problems or the lack of available consumers. As we all know our economy and our consumption is built on debt and has been for decades. Financiers have been nothing short of brilliant in keeping the train moving down the track. But it's sort of a game of chicken and no one wants to be in the oval office when that locomotive crashes. Aggressiveness in foreign policy is the leading player in the drive to find markets. Business has imperatives, not morals.

Data mining and even wiretapping would go down easily in the finance community if such measures were likely to be effective....

These people don't care. Death and destruction can work well for them. What they can't stand is uncertainty and loss. And this is likely to influence what happens with Iran and Russia and China as well. However, there is always the human element. The citizens of the US could act, scream, make a scene demanding an end to the Bush agenda. Who knows? If he were impeached and convicted he might even vacate the White House. Then again, he might not. To repeat something from the last blog: Hitler made only one mistake: he lost the war.

The Long War ?

Zarqawi is dead. Most stories I've read about him state that his connection to Al Qaeda was something late in his career and may have as much to do with his being tagged that way by Westerners as by his own choice (Al Qaeda itself is a loose organization in that anyone might claim to belong. I doubt there's any trademark protection). Sort of if they want to think of me that way, why not? It seems he was a hateful man and a brutal killer; we cannot mourn his death. But his career and his demise are instructive. He certainly threw fuel on the flames of ethnic tensions but he didn't create them. The US forces didn't look to arrest him; they used 500-lb. bombs. That seems to be the way things go in Iraq and maybe Afghanistan: we don't look for soldiers to surrender; we identify targets for destruction. And it seems the lawyers for the Marines being investigated for the Haditha killings are saying that their clients followed accepted military practice. What would it mean if that were true?

Mr. Bush says we are in a "long war" and this war seems to have noone with whom to negotiate a ceasefire or conclude a peace. Most Iraqis want us gone. Most Americans want our forces to leave. But our voices are not heard, let alone heeded. Maybe the business community will have some sway. There's an old saying that Hitler made only one mistake, he lost the war. Since this long war isn't against an organized state and "we" don't seem to trust the rule of law, you know, that quaint idea which was once at the heart of the United States, it's hard to forsee an end. In fact, when the USSR dissolved and Russia was in criminal turmoil as people shot and killed their way to wealth many complained that Russia lacked that self-same rule of law. Now it appears we no longer need laws; now we have the Decider (He has no ear for language, does He?). This long war will have no end and it will create new enemies on a daily basis if we keep interfering in the lives of other peoples and their countries. For all who might welcome our landing on the "shores of Tripoli" there will be many who will disagree. We are creating these terrorists through our behavior and if our response is to kill them, well, there are a whole lot of people in the world. Good time to invest in weapons manufacturers?

The Decider is reorganizing our society to be in a permanent state of war. The Decider wants us in a permanent state of fear. The Decider wants to know everything about us, as though we harbored enemies. The Decider is the law. For more than a century some have claimed that our style of laws was only a means to ensure the dominance of power and that as conditions changed laws adapted or were dropped to maintain power in those new conditions. If they were right then we are in deep trouble now. If accepted military practice is to shoot and kill children after an attack on our soldiers --something right out of a WW II movie showing the enormity of the Nazis -- will the eventual toll be in the billions? This long war is about dominance and like all bullies we're unlikely to run out of potential enemies. After WW II some wanted to immediately go to war with the USSR. Today's Russia is weaker but with its energy reserves and its location it's not hard to understand why the Decider's string puller verbally challenges that nation. Forget Iran. Is an American attack on Russia somewhere on the agenda? Given the Decider's pursuit of dominance and capital's need for growth I'd assume it is. A couple of lines from a deceased American poet, Kenneth Patchen: "I don't want to startle you, but they are going to kill most of us."

Muddled Thinking

On Thursday, May 31, an article named "Unionism and Workers' Liberation" by Tom Wetzel was published on Znet that tried, however poorly, to speak to the tasks ahead for the working class. The piece was a veritable stew of differing ideas and positions and is unlikely to help the cause of workers' liberation, even if well intended. Early on he writes "Class is about power that arises in the system of social production." Not very illuminating but also not worth arguing. Next he claims "...there is a vast network of work relations where people are doing things for other people. This is what I mean by social production." That certainly clarifies nothing. A secretary with the boss's coffee? The postal delivery person (mailman in 20th century lingo) with a letter from grandma? A dope dealer selling a fix to a junkie? I guess he's talking about division of labor. No doubt I'm being unfair here but as he began the article with a reference to Marx and since Marx lived during the great expansion of the industrial proletariat and big industry, all commentators thereafter have felt the need to justify including "soft" trades' workers as working class: bureaucrats, service workers, etc. I don't wish to get ahead of myself, but people who are concerned about workers and classes and capitalism really should read the man himself. Mr Wetzel did not include any works by Marx in his references. For example, one might read "On the Question of Free Trade" a speech given by Marx in Brussels in late 1847 and published in February, 1848 for an interesting taste of the man himself. A century and a half after being written it could be published in a periodical today and other than its specificity of being about the Corn Laws one might think it had been written yesterday right down to quoting a preacher on free trade being justified in the Bible ("Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ.")! For the curious there is an internet archive of Marx et. al. here. The most amazing thing about Marx is his relevance today. Plus ça change....

From reading Mr. Wetzel's piece it is obvious that he is not a Marxist but he brought Marx up in his first sentence, and since Marx wrote the book(s) on the working class and its struggles, I'd suggest he either promote Marx, criticize Marx, or leave the dead man in peace. In the first book of Capital Marx writes that if one works for wages and produces surplus value for a capitalist then one is a proletarian. Confusion over class(ifying) is not a post-Marxian, post-Soviet, post-20th century problem. In Marx's day there were postmen and telegraphs and railroads and machinery, as well as policemen and professors and drug addicts. Now a taste from Mr. Wetzel himself:

Class systems arise because of structures that give certain people power over others, and over the wealth created, in social production. Of course, some people are children, not yet actively engaged in the social economy in most cases. Others are retired or unemployed. When I talk about social classes I assume that children are a part of the social class of their parents. I assume that retired people are still a part of the class they were in before they retired. This makes sense because the class that people grow up in shapes their life prospects and their loyalties. A person's class situation before retirement will affect things like how long they are likely to live or how economically secure they will be in retirement.

Again, a bunch of words that don't really help. I think he's just worried about covering all bases for the people who will ask "But what about _____ or how about _____?" as though his readers were pre-schoolers with endless streams of questions. By covering too much he explains too little. How about the Google janitor who cashed in after the IPO and then retired at the age of 35 and put the dollars into Treasuries and worries now about the bond market? Did he cross that class line?

The article goes on to specify "...two structures in contemporary America that create a division into classes...": property and the corporation. Since the corporation is merely a legal tool for controlling property, it should be considered a sublisting under property and he should really refer to private property. (As late as the 1980's, during Gorbachev's ruinous reign, public polls in the USSR surveyed opinion about changing the laws to allow land to become privately owned; survey said "No!" by a large margin. Do you suppose Gorby was a mole?) Mr. Wetzel's point here is to talk of the growth of corporations so he can update Marxian classes. The corporation, originally called a joint-stock company, actually predates Marx. And Mr. Wetzel's slide into Frederick Taylor and the birth of industrial engineering implicitly dismisses about two centuries of writing about the improvement of tools and techniques to increase labor's productivity thereby allowing increased extraction of surplus value. Here it seems the point is to justify naming a new class (just like a new species of butterfly) by playing up the growth of some managerial class. So now, according to this analysis, to capitalists and proletarians we must add the "coordinator" class of managers and engineers and other professionals. It's as though, mostly through ignorance I guess, everyone in America has this idea that capitalist = Ebeneezer Scrooge, kind of one owner, one boss, with everyone else being downtrodden. Guess what? There were foremen in 19th century factories and slave bosses as well.

The difficulty is that classes are defined in Marxism by their relationship to ownership of the means of production. And it's not clear that one needs to create classes to explain everything, leaving no stones unturned. When the Bolsheviks were striving for power they killed the Tsar and his family; they didn't look it up in a Karl Marx-endorsed checklist. If the capitalists pay henchmen to keep the workers under heel do we thereby need a new class to explain them? The recently retired CEO of ExxonMobil was paid, including his retirement package, almost a billion dollars for his 12 years of service. Was he a capitalist, a proletarian, a coordinator, or an even newer species? The point is that in the capitalist era the basic class relations are determinative; truly change the fundamentals and you change everything. Structures, or more accurately superstructures, arise and are paid to defend the capitalists: laws and the legislatures that create them and the very legislators that vote on them, police and the armed forces and the courts, including the Supreme Court, to enforce these laws, media to shape the public's attitudes with propaganda, including editorialists and there are no commentators more antagonistic to workers than lefties or reformed lefties. Capitalists are always looking for productivity improvements to lower the cost of labor thus increasing surplus value. In the field of software, easy-to-use progamming tools are constantly being invented to cut the time to produce programs and to lower the skill level needed to create those same programs while the work positions themselves are being outsourced. I recall reading complaints on a tech web site about programmers being turned into proletarians! He should have checked his class card when he first took the job. Thought experiment here: Imagine asking a business owner (capitalist): "If you get down to the nitty-gritty, who in your company is really indispensable?" I'd lay odds the true response would be: "Other than myself, no one." And to every capitalist every other capitalist is only needed until he can buy or crush them all.

More from Mr. Wetzel:

Recognizing the existence of the coordinator class helps us to explain who the ruling class is in the various Communist countries. The Leninist revolutions eliminated the capitalist class, creating systems of public ownership of means of production, but the working class continued to be subordinated and exploited. These revolutions revealed that the coordinator class has the power to be a ruling class.

Now we're getting down to the substance with "coordinators" as the new ruling class. To deal with this adequately would take a book but to begin one must remember that, in Marxian terms, a class is not defined by the individuals or subgroupings which comprise it, or the industries where it works or owns, or the organizations to which it might belong. His statement that after the October revolution that Russian workers continued to be subordinated and exploited doesn't bear scrutiny. The basis of the economy changed where labor-power lost its commodity status, where workers were deliberately recruited for membership in the party, moved into supervisory positions in factories (interestingly, this produced much discussion both within the party and among the affected workers as to whether moving from the shop floor to the office changed their proletarian status!), were given preferential treatment over others (mostly the petit bourgeois elements), where outmoded factories were kept open even with low productivity (this in the 1970s!) so that workers wouldn't be unemployed through the introduction of microelectronics. Throughout most, if not all, of Soviet history, workers, whether in factories or driving buses, had higher wages than professors and doctors.

Mr. Wetzel goes on a bit more differentiating this new class so he can find some who might be workers' allies. Back in Marx's time he thought that proletarian revolution was on the day's menu and ever since every Marxist has been wondering why it's taking so long. But a revolution, notwithstanding how we use the term, is more correctly applied to an historical process than to discrete events. As with the aforementioned proletarianized programmers, the proletariat becomes aware of itself as a class. Think of the middle managers who get laid off with statistically zero probability of finding new jobs that duplicate their previous incomes. Look, we didn't need new classes for cops and soldiers 150 years ago and we don't need new classes for engineers and managers today. Figuring out where individuals and groups fit in and where the historical trends are going and who's going to become friend or foe is difficult but that doesn't change the basic framework. Reading Marx now, in 2006, one is struck by just how contemporary his analysis is.

Lest we forget the title -Unions- we move from the error-riddled preamble where Mr. Wetzel took the wrong turn and we move to his proposals.

Ownership of the means of production by the capitalists is only one of the structures that tramples the self-management of working people. The coordinator class's relative monopolization of conditions for control of work also subordinates the working class. Thus changing the ownership structure of the economy, from private to public ownership, would not be sufficient to liberate the working class. The power of the coordinator class over the working class would also need to be dissolved. To do this, the working class would need to replace the existing corporate and state hierarchies with economic and political institutions that would embody their collective self-management of production and control over social affairs.

And:

If we are to create a society in which the people can directly control their lives, a society in which workers run the industries where they work, the process of self-management must emerge in self-management of mass organizations of working people. The self-managed mass organizations prefigure self-management of social production by workers and the direct self-governance of society by the mass of the people.

It would seem we are going to eliminate engineers and accountants. Or would that be make ordinary workers into engineers and accountants? Or do workers simply talk among themselves and spreadsheets and blueprints will magically appear? It's necessary to understand that in the capitalists' drive to increase productivity one aspect is to dumb down skilled labor. The lower the skill level needed the easier the job is to fill and less wages to be paid. As with the aforementioned programming scenario this tends to increase a low wage work force while creating a small group of highly skilled workers: Mr. Wetzel's experts. But progressives should not take up a seemingly logical step and desire to keep productivity low and average worker skill levels high. Increasing productivity can benefit the working class. The issue is ownership and control. Don't fall for the bait of education is the key to better jobs. Must we eliminate automated machine tools and go back to manually set-up lathes? Do we reinvent the "putting-out" industry of Marx's day? Must we all become medically competent as well?

Self-management, synonym for democracy, is wonderful, but in a country of 300 million people where most things are manufactured overseas and many things are partially foreign-made, just how do shop floor debates regulate production? It's Mr. Wetzel who needs to update his perspective: we are in the 21st century. Worker control sounds great but everything today is intertwined. Representative control and coordinated planning is the only way to go. One hundred years ago this was called a Communist Party. I'm reminded of an old cartoon by Sidney Harris showing two men at a blackboard with equations to left and right and one man pointing to the empty middle and saying: "Then a miracle happens." As a Soviet political economist named Arbatov wrote in the '70s: "Marxists accept the world as it is without reservations." If one reads the writings of Abraham Lincoln one discovers that Marx's American contemporary was aware of the proletariat. Lincoln, and others of his day, wrote disparagingly of "wage slavery" as it was then called. Lincoln's hope was that, in those pastoral days, all would have their own small holdings (ownership society!) as farmers or be small proprietors. But the handwriting was on the wall back then and we can still read it today. The arrow of time is an interesting philosophical and physical problem, but to date no one has been able to turn back history. And grumbling by GM assembly plant workers won't make those alternators arrive if the Delphi workers self-managed an inconvenient vacation.

Mr. Wetzel moves onto unions, bemoaning the "coordinator class" that controls most of them. Specifically his detailed analysis is fine, but he doesn't seem to understand that unions are economic bargaining units, not revolutionary political organizations. Unions accept the class divisions and work to get the best deal for their members within that system. But just as rank and file union members 40 years ago were virulently anti-communist and anti-left and were happy to get the best for themselves without much class solidarity, such as shutting down whole industries in strike support, the unions' leaders were often more interested in their own well-being than even their own members let alone workers in general. Without correct political analysis unions are at best reformist organizations.

Mr. Wetzel doesn't like union dues check-off agreements since it gives the large international and its corrupt coordinators guaranteed income. At the same time he thinks membership should be voluntary but that it's okay for workers to coerce their fellows to join! Bolshevism on the rise! In fact, the history of unionism in the US has some baseball bats in it but as long as they're not Commies it's acceptable. As Mr. Wetzel writes: "In any viable democratic collectivity there will inevitably be constraints on the will of the individual. That's part of democracy." Would that be subordination? Where does one draw the line? Bolshevik coercion is terrorism; co-worker coercion is democracy.

Mr. Wetzel disfavors full-time, paid union officials. I'd think this is more of a technical than substantive issue, the important thing being what those officials do for the membership and the working class. And Mr. Wetzel disfavors not only reliance on the Democratic Party but politics itself. Frankly, electoral politics is a bit of a scam where every few years we get to pick one or another of the capitalists' choices to misrepresent us. But as with unionism itself electoral politics is a school, one of the hard knocks variety, that teaches workers just what they can and cannot accomplish in a liberal democracy. There's a relevant quote from an article in Russia during the Bolsheviks' drive for power: "In order to grasp the bourgeoisie by the throat it is necessary to step over the corpse of Social Democracy." (A current news report tells of graffiti in Iraq: "Democracy killed my son.")

The labor movement needs to guard its independence of the dominating classes - and its independence of politicians, political parties and the state. The strategy should emphasize direct involvement of ordinary people in movements - participatory democracy, and empowerment of the rank and file.

Here Mr. Wetzel conflates politics with electoral politics, totally misunderstands the concept "state" yet talks of participatory democracy. If my old brain can be trusted participatory democracy as a phrase grew out of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) which itself grew out of the League for Industrial Democracy and these organizations were developed to coopt frustrated, budding leftists into an outlet that was non-Communist, even anti-Communist. The state is the instrument of class power and if Mr. Wetzel wants workers to truly have power he'd better figure out how to get those workers' hands on the state's apparatus. Or maybe it's in another statement of his: "...the American working class were able to make major gains during the 1930s and 40s because of their power of disruption...." The workers will sit down and pout until they get their way. Just what is this participatory democracy if it's not hierarchical enough to lead 100+ million workers into a position of power?

A fundamental fallacy in Leninism is its inference from the necessity of the organizer, instigator, activist role to the idea of a "vanguard" that concentrates social movement expertise and decision-making control in its hands.

There's so much wrong with this statement, not the least of which is that he is dictating that there will be no dictating. The fundamental issue is that leadership must, in fact, represent the proletarian class interests and not that they take steps without a vote over every issue. To me it seems that Mr. Wetzel is a bit of a utopian socialist and perhaps like idealists of old he should start his own small society. Otherwise he'd best wake up and smell the coffee. Historically, only Communists successfully overthrew capitalists and there's nothing wishy-washy about Communists. Anyone who lived through some of the red-baiting years remembers the taunting of leftists as pinkos, as though one went to sleep a leftist and woke up a Communist, best encapsulated by the 1950's era film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

If the working class is to mount an effective challenge to the dominating classes, it must project its collective power throughout the whole of the society. A working class movement needs to develop solutions for the various problems that the society faces...

Lenin wrote that there can be no revolution without a revolutionary theory. Mr. Wetzel says he wants a revolution. He might want to work on the theory a bit, while he's waiting for the magic to happen. I wouldn't have been so carping about his article but it mentions Marx and Lenin and the October Revolution. It would have been nice if Mr. Wetzel had known enough about those men and that era to not misrepresent and so grossly misunderstand them. In many ways during the 20th century the capitalists' best ally in the struggle to keep down the working class was the liberal, anti-Communist left. It offered an escape valve for liberals but never threatened power, you know the kind of power that comes out of the barrel of a gun.