Howard Zinn Defends Studs Terkel From Red-Baiting in the Times

Studs Terkel in 1992, taking a bus home after working on his show at WFMT radio in Chicago. Among Mr. Terkel’s oral-history books: “Working” (1974).


Published on Friday, November 7, 2008 by The Progressive

Howard Zinn Defends Studs Terkel From Red-Baiting in the Times

Note: See New York Times article below.

by Howard Zinn

Reading Edward Rothstein's sour commentary on Studs Terkel in the New York Times on November 2 I was surprised that Rothstein, presumably a sophisticated thinker, seems to believe one can separate one's political views from a historical narrative, even from oral history.

"It is, in fact, impossible to separate Mr. Terkel's political vision from the contours of his oral history," he wrote.

It turns out that Rothstein is not complaining about Studs's intrusion of his "political vision" into his oral histories. I doubt, knowing Studs pretty well, that he would deny that. Indeed, I suspect he would embrace it.

Would he be proud of attempting (yes, attempting, because it cannot really be done) to be a neutral conduit of his interviewees' thoughts?

No, what Rothstein resents is the specific character of this intrusion -- that is, Studs's political beliefs.

On Studs's oral history: "You grow cautious as you keep reading," Rothstein wrote. I'm inclined to think that Rothstein did not "grow" cautious, but that he started out being cautious, on the alert for radical ideas, or worse, anything that might suggest Marxism.

Rothstein is disappointed in Studs, because "he seemed to be a scrappy liberal ... but look more closely and it becomes less clear where his liberalism slips into radicalism."

Rothstein is evidently a proud liberal, possibly scrappy. I suspect Terkel, were he still alive, would have approved what Norman Mailer wrote once to Playboy magazine: "I don't care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative, but please don't ever call me a liberal."

Rothstein gives examples of Studs's "radicalism." These are positions, which are so reasonable that they would give a good name to "radicalism," just as McCain's worry that Obama is "socialist" because he wants to redistribute wealth divests socialism of its worst connotations and makes it quite attractive.

For instance, Rothstein objects to Terkel comparing FDR's reaction to the Depression to Reagan's reaction to economic distress, wherein Terkel says that FDR "recognized a need and lent a hand" while Reagan "lends a smile."

Rothstein doesn't like the quote marks around Studs's "The Good War" because "the emphasis, again and again, is on World War II's shadows and injustices."

But would any reasonable -- yes, "balanced" -- assessment of that war not emphasize (precisely because that has been missing in the general romanticization of the "good war") the "shadows and injustices": Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans, the segregation in the armed forces?

Rothstein finds that "nearly every one of the positions approvingly intimated by him seem to fit models shaped by Marxist theory."

Should we be alarmed?

I can understand why J.Edgar Hoover would be alarmed. But someone as well educated as Edward Rothstein?

Looking at the state of the world, observing capitalism self-destruct to the point where even the Wall Street Journal questions its viability, it would seem that it may be time to take a second look at "models shaped by Marxist theory."

"The difficulty is for readers who presume they are being presented history without perspective, just a series of oral histories," Rothstein writes.

Is Rothstein one of those readers? Does he believe, does anyone believe, who has given some thought to the myth of "objective" history, that one can present history "without perspective"?

Indeed, would that be desirable? Do we want from history, even oral history, to be "just" a series of statements that suggest no perspective?

Rothstein worries that with Studs's oral histories "one is no longer sure what is being omitted and how much is being fully seen." Surely, he must understand -- unless he possesses a naiveté we would never suspect in a New York Times writer -- that one is never sure what is being omitted, and therefore we must always look beyond the words set before us.

And no phenomenon is "fully seen" so we try to see as much as we can, and add to the universe of knowledge, as Studs Terkel did so brilliantly, our little piece of truth.


New York Times article:

An Appraisal

He Gave Voice to Many, Among Them Himself
Chris Walker/The Chicago Tribune, via Associated Press


By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 2, 2008

The voice is unforgettable, as if each phrase scraped the ear with a scoopful of gravel. What remains in the memory too is the earnestness that could turn both fervent and sentimental. And there was the music, jazz and blues that often provided a respite from the trademark persona.

But after hearing that Studs Terkel had died on Friday, I thought about his WFMT radio shows, which I had heard during my years in graduate school in Chicago. He seemed to be without pretense and compassionate but not terribly revealing or comforting. He had some terrific guests, but he rarely stood aside.

Since Mr. Terkel’s death, testimonials have proliferated. “I think he was the most extraordinary social observer this country has produced,” Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry at Harvard, told The Los Angeles Times.

“He was the quintessential American writer,” Representative Dennis J. Kucinich wrote on The Nation’s Web site, thenation.com. “He was our Boswell, our Whitman, our Sandburg.” (Though wasn’t Whitman already our Whitman and Sandburg our Sandburg?)

And without Mr. Terkel’s radio program, which was broadcast daily between 1952 and 1997, and without his books of oral history — including one that won him the Pulitzer Prize — it is difficult to imagine that National Public Radio would have evolved in the way it did, or that Ken Burns could have made oral history into a cinematic tradition. Just dip into some of the imposing volumes of oral history, in which Mr. Terkel took on the social world of the 20th century — “Hard Times,” “The Good War” or “Working” — and you are amazed at the range of people who spoke with him about the Depression, the Second World War or the world of the workplace: the bookmaker and the stockbroker, the carpenter and the washroom attendant, the mayor and the supermarket cashier. Mr. Terkel anticipated the academic movement of recent decades to tell history from below — not from the perspective of the makers of history but from the perspective of those who have been shaped by it. He once said he was interested in the masons who might have built the Chinese Wall, or the cooks in Caesar’s army. That is also one of oral history’s implicit ambitions: using a populist style to tell populist history. The oral historian does little more than hold up a mirror, just making sure the glass is clean. The practice claims to be self-effacing and world-revealing. How can a collection of interviews be anything else?

But if you look closely at these oral histories, you can never forget who has shaped them and to what end. It often seems easy to guess whom Mr. Terkel liked and who is there to make a particular point or provide ironic contrast. When in “Working” — compiled in the early 1970s — we read about a public-school teacher who is unfashionably strict in her classroom, the rhetorical blade cuts the shape of the account. She ends by telling of her most memorable pupil who was “special” and “never any trouble,” later a cashier at a supermarket who “gives no one trouble today either” and “has the same smile for everyone.” Neither the teacher nor her star pupil is meant to be admired.

The most admired are those who, because of personal gifts, transcend the monotony of working life; the most respected are those who come to recognize those horrors most clearly and speak of them. The interviews fit the intellectual framework set up by the “Working” introduction: “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the body.” That means it includes, in Mr. Terkel’s list, ulcers, accidents, shouting matches, fistfights, nervous breakdowns, daily humiliations and “scars, psychic as well as physical.” There are some, he says, who may enjoy their work, but these cases may “tell us more about the person than about his task.” He seems to cheer the questioning of the “work ethic,” though he himself clearly relished it and relied upon it.

This vision of work, though, is an obvious translation of a traditional Marxist view of the alienation of labor — the sense of disassociation that comes from the capitalist workplace. The most transformative accomplishment would be to recognize the causes of that alienation, because that would help usher in a new world; this is what Mr. Terkel seems to cherish in his most admired laborers and what he hopes to accomplish in the book itself.

It is, in fact, impossible to separate Mr. Terkel’s political vision from the contours of his oral history. You grow more cautious as you keep reading. Mr. Terkel seems less to be discovering the point latent in his conversations than he is in shaping the conversations to make a latent point.

This is not something often recognized about these books. Yet when Mr. Terkel’s 1970 oral history of the 1930s Depression, “Hard Times,” was reissued in 1986 in the heart of the Reagan administration, Mr. Terkel’s new introduction worked strenuously to show how the two eras were comparably nightmarish — though the 1980s never had anything like the 25 percent unemployment of the earlier era. Mr. Terkel writes: “In the ’30s, an administration recognized a need and lent a hand. Today an administration recognizes an image and lends a smile.” Similarly, Mr. Terkel’s 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Good War,” has a title in ironic quotation marks because the emphasis, again and again, is on World War II’s shadows and injustices, with allusions, in the words of one interviewer singled out for attention, to a contemporary “meanness of soul.”

All this is saying, perhaps, is that Mr. Terkel was a man of the political left — something of which he made no secret. The difficulty is for readers who presume they are being presented history without perspective, just a series of oral histories. But its perspective actually seems to guide its strategy, so one is no longer sure what is being omitted and how much is being fully seen. No part of history or human experience should be ignored, but all of it needs to be placed in a larger context.

Part of Mr. Terkel’s wide appeal was that he seemed to be a scrappy liberal in his choice of causes and concerns, but look more closely and it becomes less clear where his liberalism slips into radicalism. Though Mr. Terkel was not a theorist, nearly every one of the positions approvingly intimated by him seem to fit models shaped by Marxist theory; he even wore something red every day to affirm his attachment to the working class.

Mr. Terkel also provided a blurb for the memoirs of William Ayers, the Weatherman bomber whose connection with Barack Obama has been a point of controversy. “A deeply moving elegy to all those young dreamers who tried to live decently in an indecent world,” Mr. Terkel wrote. “Ayers provides a tribute to those better angels of ourselves.”

Mr. Terkel presented himself as an avuncular angel with close contact with the salt of the earth, a populist with a humane vision of the world. There are times such gifts are evident, but there are also times when such dreamers should make us wary.

Karl Marx's guide to the end of capitalism: a primer

Stuart Jeffries The Guardian, Tuesday October 21 2008
Karl Marx (1818-1883), author of Das Kapital. Photo: Bettman/Corbis

Sales of Marx's Capital are reportedly soaring as the world realises that this was where he prophesied how capitalism will destroy itself. So it's time for a Capital primer, time to talk fetishism (yay!) of commodities (d'oh!).

1. Commodities. A chair is a commodity - not because you can sit on it, but because it was produced by humans to be traded. Each commodity has a use value, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants.

2. Exchange value. How, you'll be asking, can one measure the difference in value between, say, a 80GB iPod, and a new copy of Capital? It's the exchange value, stupid. This is measured by the amount of labour that goes into making each commodity - such is the Marxist labour theory of value, and the source of what Marx called the fetishism of commodities.

3. Literary value. As Francis Wheen stresses in his biography of Marx, Capital is partly a racy gothic novel, a Frankenstein-like tale of how we created a monster from which we are alienated and which, by means of class struggle, we will slay.

4. Capital. This is money used to buy more money. Like God, capital seems mystical and immutable, but is really only a function of social relationships (Rowan Williams, a Marx fan, disagrees with the God bit). Capitalists think capital has magical significance. Socialist revolution will disabuse them of that.

5. Exploitation. Commodity sales increase the amount of exchange-value owned by capitalists, yielding profit and thus helping them accumulate capital. How? You accumulate capital by the creation of surplus value, which is unpaid labour appropriated by employers.

6. Crises. Capitalists aren't especially interested in accumulating commodities (once you've got a hot tub for your Lear jet, it's hard to decide what else to spend it on) and the incessant drive to amass capital causes crises. The over-expansion of credit by greedy capitalists recently resulted in more goods being sold than can be bought from income and savings. The result? Widespread debts, straitened circumstances (think coarse toilet paper) and happy days for repo men (boo!).

7. Profit. This falls when capitalism exhausts its capacity for growth. Also, as technology improves and productivity rises, more goods are produced, which are worth less.

8. The end. Whether such crises will destroy capitalism is uncertain. Marx thought they would but he wasn't convincing about when. It will, though, end. Some time. Maybe before Christmas.

Make way for the working class to have a say…

This enormous economic mess we are now experiencing, along with the heavy debt the bankers and the politicians of both major political parties have saddled us with, can be summed up very simply: The capitalists have taken all the profits and left the working class with all the problems.

There are only two sources of wealth: Labor and Mother Nature.

Anyone with an ounce of common sense understands that if you allow labor to be continually exploited and Mother Nature to be repeatedly abused and raped there will be severe consequences.

We are now reaping the consequences for allowing this parasitical monster of state-monopoly capitalism to have spun its web of corruption in the form of a cannibalistic military-financial-industrial complex which now threatens to consume and destroy our families, our communities, our State and our Nation while wreaking havoc in other lands.

Enough!

The time has come to put the needs of people before corporate profits.

There is only one alternative; for working people to come together to build a new society on the foundation created by the socialists of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party.

We need to fight and struggle to re-establish the liberal, democratic and progressive socialist traditions for which Minnesota is known around the world.

We have complex problems before us… but, any country which can spend trillions of dollars on wars to steal the oil of other nations, and trillions of dollars bailing out corporations and bankers looking for using socialism to solve the problems of their own creation as they have sought to prop up their rotten capitalist system--- which they have touted to the world as being the best--- at our expense… This Nation can now come up with the resources to use socialism to solve the problems for the rest of us, too.

What is good for the goose is, in this case, is even better for the gander.

Let Barack Obama and John McCain volunteer to go off exploring the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for Osama Bin Laden; we have better things to do.

Our first priority is to end these dirty wars for oil and redeploy those funds--- as we bring home the troops--- to creating a world class socialized health care system which will create millions of new jobs; five messes the money-grubbing Wall Street coupon clippers and their bought and paid for politicians created, all solved at the same time by ending these dirty imperialist wars for oil and regional domination--- we get health care not warfare, and we begin to solve the problem of unemployment--- and when we put people to work in this way we begin to create a new--- functioning--- people oriented, cooperative, socialist economy where democracy will flourish because it will require the full participation and involvement of all people working together in order to succeed.

Second, without further delay, we need to establish the State Bank of Minnesota to accomplish for our State what the State Bank of North Dakota was set up, by workers and farmers, to do--- fund enterprises to keep people working.

Third, we need a minimum wage which is a real living wage arrived at by the calculations of the United States Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics in cooperation with the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development--- based upon the real figures relating to the real cost of living and this minimum wage should be required by legislation to be updated quarterly right along with the release of all economic indicators to assure a quality life and decent standard of living for all working people and their families.

We have finally come to the point where even the parasitic bankers and the exploiting industrialists now concede that only socialism can bail them out of this horrible mess and solve their problems... capitalism has reached the end of the line and the only thing now to be had from the system is unending human misery.

At the point where society has to pay to clean up the corrupt mess these parasitic predatory lenders and financial institutions have created, this is the time to say:

Enough!

What tax-payers finance, tax-payers must own.

If Warren Buffett and Goldman Sachs do not like these terms, these greedy pigs should make the trip to their off-shore banks in the Cayman Islands and make withdrawals from their accounts to pay to solve their own problems.

The time has come to roll up our sleeves, come together, and get to work quickly before this entire rotten system collapses---like the I35-W Bridge--- and crushes us all while leaving our children and grandchildren with the clean-up and the bills.

I firmly believe working people can run our country and our state better than any of the big-business politicians being funded by the corporate lobbyists.

Effectively using the tools of public ownership and nationalization combined with modern, scientific planning for the common good, we can put people to work in decent jobs at real living wages... we hear it all the time just before Election Day: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs... but we never see the jobs, and if we do, these jobs are poverty wage jobs no one can live on.

I intend to run for Governor of Minnesota in 2010.

I invite all working people who think that it is possible to create something better than the mess we are now in, to come together and work from where socialist Governors Floyd B. Olson and Elmer A. Benson left off in trying to create a just and decent society where people live and work in harmony with Mother Nature, to join with me, in establishing the Minnesota Party to give the bankers, the mining, forestry and power generating industries along with the industrialists and big-agribusiness a real run for their money.

Let’s run these parasites that have been living off of our labor and destroying Mother Nature right out of our state. We can get along just fine--- even better--- without them.

Alan L. Maki

Director of Organizing,
Midwest Casino Workers Organizing Council

and

Candidate for Governor of Minnesota

Former member: Minnesota Democratic Farmer-Labor Party State Central Committee

Support ATU Local 1005

Brothers and Sisters,

I warmly share the statement by the Gus Hall Action Club, a Marxist-Leninist Communist club in central Minnesota, supporting the public transit "bus and train driver's union" of the Twin Cities, ATU 1005, in their fight for a good contract. Our statement provides Marxist education on state-monopoly capitalism, a bit on class struggle, etc. and features quotes by Gus Hall. We proudly point out that our statement also deals with the question of high fuel prices by calling for the nationalization of the oil, gas and energy industries.

This statement is being distributed on leaflets by members of the Gus Hall Action Club directly to the bus drivers of ATU 1005.

We encourage you to circulate this e-mail, post it on blogs, etc...

Cheers, Michael Wood



Support ATU 1005 (the "bus and train drivers union") in their fight for a Good Contract!



Statement by the Gus Hall Action Club. http://gushallactionclub.blogspot.com



"The history of all hitherto existing society," Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "is the history of class struggles." And class struggle runs like a red thread through ATU (the Amalgamated Transit Union) local 1005's fight for a good contract.



State-monopoly capitalism unites the power of capitalist monopolies with that of the state. "The essence of state-monopoly capitalism," Otto Kuusinen said in Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, "is the direct union of the power of capitalist monopolies with the enormous power of the state." And this, in part, explains why Metro Transit is trying to attack union member's wages and healthcare. Metro Transit's "final offer" for a contract was an insult and an attack on the working class. ATU 1005 is now working without a contract as the struggle continues. As ATU 1005's fighting spirit proves, the working class, as Otto Kuusinen pointed out in Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, is "a class of fighters, a class of builders."

ATU 1005's struggle is on behalf of our entire working class. It is in the class interests of all working class people to stand in solidarity with ATU 1005, the "bus and train driver's union," and insist that the union's demands and contract proposals be met in full.



Gus Hall, writing in Working Class USA, had exactly that attitude which all working class folks should have towards ATU 1005's fight for a good contract: "We are for any demand that cuts down on profits, ups wages, cuts down on speedup, shortens hours, protects workers' health."



At the same time as Metro Transit refuses to agree to ATU 1005's efforts for a good contract, they are forcing through bus fare increases. This is another attack on working class people. Don't believe the hype that the union is to blame. Gus Hall said in Basics that "the ideological machinery of capitalism grinds out propaganda against labor in an endless stream, like a sausage machine turns out frankfurters." Bosses and their mouthpieces have always tried to split the ranks of the working class, but, as Otto Kuusinen pointed out in Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, "unity of workers has a firm, objective basis--the community of class interests." Bus riders and drivers have a common interest in ATU 1005's fight for a good contract. An injury to one is an injury to all.



Metro Transit says high fuel costs are to blame for the upcoming bus fare increase. What is a real solution to the high price of fuel? Nationalize the oil, gas and energy industries! Gus Hall wrote in The Energy Rip-Off that "nationalization under democratic people's control can result in real gains for the American people." "Nationalization," Hall says in Working Class USA, is "when an industry is taken over by the government and run for the benefit of the people."



Otto Kuusinen points out in Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism that: "Communists insist on nationalization being carried out in a way that really curtails the power of the monopoly capitalists and improves the lot of working people."



It is in the class interests of all working class people to stand in solidarity with ATU 1005, the "bus and train driver's union," and insist that their contract demands and proposals be met in full.



What can you do? Call Metro Transit Council at 651-602-1000 and tell them that you support ATU 1005 and their demands for a good contract. Post a blog or write a letter to the editor of a newspaper supporting ATU 1005 in the contract fight. And make sure that you show the drivers that you support them the next time you get on a bus.



Gus Hall Action Club. http://gushallactionclub.blogspot.com

Perspectives on the U.S. Financial Crisis

Perspectives on the U.S. Financial Crisis

Sam Gindin and Leo Panich

Canadian Dimension magazine, July/August 2008

http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2008/07/09/1907/

It is time to take stock. The centrality of the American economy to the capitalist world — which now literally does encompass the whole world — has spread the financial crisis that began in the U.S. housing market around the globe. And the emerging economic recession triggered in the U.S by that financial crisis now threatens to spread globally, as well.

Capitalism has had an incredible run — politically and culturally, as well as economically — since the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. The resolution of that crisis required, as economists put it at the time, “reducing expectations” of the kind nurtured by the trade-union militancy and welfare-state gains of the 1960s. This was accomplished via the defeats suffered by trade unionism and the welfare state since the 1980s at the hands of what might properly be called capitalist militancy. It was accompanied by dramatic technological change, massive industrial restructuring alongside labour-market flexibility, and the over–all discipline provided by “competitiveness.”

That discipline brought with it an enormous increase in economic inequality, the spread of permanent working-class insecurity and the privatization of various public functions and structures. But this did not mean capitalism was no longer able to integrate the bulk of the population. On the contrary, this was now achieved through the private pension funds that mobilized workers savings, on the one hand, and through the mortgage and credit markets that loaned them the money to sustain high levels of consumer spending, on the other. At the centre of this were the private banking institutions, which, following their collapse in the Great Depression, had been nurtured back to health during the postwar decades, thereafter to unleash the explosion of global financial innovation that has defined our era.

The question begged by the current crisis is whether capitalism’s capacity to integrate the mass of people through their incorporation in financial markets has run out of steam. That the fault line should have appeared in “sub-prime” mortgage loans to African-Americans is hardly surprising — this has always been the Achilles heel of working-class incorporation into the American capitalist dream. But an economic earthquake will actually only result if there is a devaluation of working-class assets in general through a collapse of housing prices and the stocks and bonds in which their retirement savings are invested.

The State and Financial Crises

We are by no means there, yet. The role being played by the Federal Reserve — very much acting as the world central bank in light of the global implications of a U.S. recession — to prevent exactly this scenario should once and for all dispel the illusion that capitalist markets thrive without state intervention. The Fed has repeatedly poured liquidity into its financial system at the first sign of trouble. The question is whether the capacity of the system to go on integrating ordinary Americans though the expansion of investor and credit markets in this way has reached its limit. This was indeed suggested by the Bush Administration’s sudden (non-military) Keynesian turn, with a $150-billion fiscal stimulus. That fiscal stimulus at the federal level may, however, be undone at the state level, especially with municipal government cutbacks, given their massive dependence on property taxes. The way financial institutions that specialized in selling risk insurance on municipal bonds were enveloped in the credit crisis has further compounded the problem. This indeed brings to mind the extent to which it was municipal governments that were on the front lines of the Great Depression.

But while the US may very well move into a recession, which even when it ends may mark the beginning of a new era of slower growth, this is very different from a depression. While there is no doubt that mortgages in Black communities and for the working poor more generally will be tightened, it seems most likely that banks, competing for markets, will continue to extend credit to working families more generally. We need to remember that the top twenty per cent and their families are extravagant consumers. While growing inequalities are grotesque, the Left has consistently underestimated the extent to which the rich can sustain overall spending. The “correction” in the dollar (alongside the strength of U.S. manufacturing in the higher-tech sectors) has already led to offsetting growth in markets abroad; U.S. exports have been growing at double-digit rates over the past few years.

Finally, the U.S. state may revive its capacities for substantive infrastructural spending, if only to stimulate the construction industry now that the housing boom is over. There is a long-neglected need to rebuild U.S. infrastructure — as the collapsed levies of New Orleans and the collapsed bridges of Minneapolis dramatically showed.

Finance and Neoliberalism

There is an understandable tendency on the Left to take hope in capitalism’s current dilemmas. The extreme liberalization of finance (and along with it the era of neoliberalism) seems discredited. Finance today appears as no more than high-flying speculation — absurdly wasteful and ultimately not sustainable. U.S. corporations remain profitable, but with the credit crunch, who will buy the goods? Discredited as well, it therefore appears, is the U.S.’s capacity to keep its own house in order, never mind lead the process of globalization. Yet, before we assume that the openings created by this crisis place us on the verge of a matching new oppositional politics, we need a more careful reading of our times. While the new openings provide the space for a new politics, we must soberly appreciate the problematic link between such openings and a radical response.

To begin with, as immoral and irrational as finance might seem, financialization has been absolutely essential to the making and reproduction of global capitalism. Second, the growing consensus that finance must be re-regulated is hardly an attack on finance or neoliberalism more generally. Rather, it is about the engineering of finance such that it can continue to be “innovative” in the service of both itself and non-financial capital. Third, whatever problems the U.S. currently faces, its dominance will not fade because of a crisis in housing or a lower exchange rate; it does us no good to underestimate the staying power of the American capitalist empire.

It is not only finance but capitalism in general that rests on speculation. Behind a new firm or a new product rests the “speculation” that it can be sold at a cost and price that generates profit. Behind the distinction between finance and the “productive sector” is therefore something else: the notion that finance speculates in pieces of paper, not in providing goods or real services; it is a parasitic drain on the economy, not a constructive addition to it.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it mistakes what is rational from the perspective of certain moral criteria with what is rational within capitalism. The financial system is necessary to capitalism’s functioning. The discipline finance has imposed in the neoliberal era on particular capitalists and workers has forced an increase in U.S. productivity rates by way of increased exploitation, the more efficient use of each unit of capital, and the reallocation of capital to sectors that are most promising — all from the standpoint of profits, of course.

The penetration by American finance of foreign countries and the inflow of foreign capital into the U.S. has given the U.S. access to global savings, shored up its role as the greatest global consumer and reinforced the U.S. state’s power and options. Especially important, financial markets have come to provide non-financial corporations with mechanisms for managing their risks and for comparing and evaluating diverse investment opportunities in a highly complex global economy. Absent this role, globalization — at least to the extent we have experienced it — would not have been possible. Finally, as emphasized earlier, the “democratization” of American finance has given workers access to finance as savers and debtors, thereby contributing to their integration into, and dependence upon, capitalism and finance.

This does not mean that the explosion of finance is not a highly contradictory process; highly volatile financial markets inevitably generate financial crises. Rather, it shifts the question from whether financialization is irrational to whether its contradictions can be managed insofar as the crises can be contained. What working classes do in this context will be crucial to answering this question.

The Dialectics of Regulation
Finance cannot exist without regulation, and the U.S. financial sector, even before the latest crisis, was the most heavily regulated of any section of the U.S. economy. In fact, the dynamics of finance cannot be understood apart from how regulation shapes financial competition, how banks and other financial institutions try to escape or reshape that regulation, and the state’s subsequent counter-responses. The current dilemma for American regulatory institutions lies in how to re-regulate finance, so as to overcome its costly and dangerous volatility, without undermining finance’s needed innovative capacity.

We need to be clear that this is about re-engineering finance to strengthen capital accumulation, not to control it in the name of a larger public interest. To place democratic regulation of finance on the agenda would require asking: “regulation for what purpose?” — and so would mean going far beyond finance itself. It would mean raising the fundamental question of social control over investment, and therefore get to the heart of power in a capitalist society.

In the context of the failed promises of the past quarter century and the current crisis, to see this issue go completely unmentioned in the Democratic primary debate may not be surprising, given the absence of even a trade-union campaign around this — but it bespeaks an impoverishment of American politics that in fact goes all the way back to the New Deal. The issue of economic democracy that had been placed on the political agenda alongside the New Deal’s public infrastructure projects was set aside for the remainder of the century after the FDR’s administration’s self-described “grand truce with capital” in the late 1930s.

It will not do, therefore, to resort to the abstractions and obfuscations of calling for “re-regulation” or a “new, new deal.” It is the undemocratic power of private control over investment that needs to be put on the agenda.

American Empire in Crisis?

Four particular aspects of the limited fall-out from the present crisis demand more serious reflection. First, the fact that the crisis surfaced in the context of strong profits and low debt loads in the non-financial sector is important, and this accounts for the limited damage thus far.

Second, it is notable that, despite the IMF calling this the most serious banking crisis since the Great Depression, we have not seen a series of bank failures. This is certainly linked to the interventions of the U.S. Fed, but it also speaks to the strength of private U.S. financial institutions. In no other country could such a crisis have unfolded without massive financial bankruptcies.

Third, it is especially worthy of note that no major state saw an opportunity in the crisis to challenge or undermine the American state. Rather, their integration into global capitalism meant that they identified this crisis as their crisis, as well. They effectively recognized the U.S.’s central bank as the world’s central bank and cooperated with it in coordinating internationally repeated provision of liquidity to the banks. As in the previous instances of financial crises during the 1980s and 1990s, this reproduced and extended the American state’s leading role in managing global capitalism.

The fourth and most important factor is the remarkable “imperial flexibility” the U.S. enjoys by virtue of the weakness of its working class. Had U.S. workers, for example, insisted upon higher wages to compensate for rising food and oil prices and the devaluation of their homes, and had they taken advantage of the competitive space offered by a falling dollar, the Fed would have had to cope with the fear of inflation, and this might have meant higher rather than lower interest rates. And that could very well have aggravated the crisis and risked a financial meltdown. But rather than the working class demanding more, in fact it showed restraint — or, in the case of the autoworkers, accepted the greatest concessions the union has ever made.

The more important question, therefore, is not the economics of crisis but its politics. How will the working class respond to the crisis? If credit continues but becomes more costly; if the loss of private pensions, negotiated health care and the devaluation of homes force people into having to reduce consumption to shore up their savings; if food and oil prices leave less discretionary spending — if this is the near-term future, will workers rebel? Or will workers once again tighten their belts to preserve what is left from their past gains? And if frustrations are expressed politically, will the politics be limited to a longing for the good-old days before the crisis or before Bush?

Absent what Alan Sears at the recent Great Lakes Political Economy Graduate Student Conference at York University called “an infrastructure of resistance,” any opposition that does surface is most likely to be localized and contained, rather than built upon. A coherent alternative is not just a set of economic policy proposals, but a political movement that can develop the popular appreciation and capacities for radical democratic control over investment. There should be no illusion that a recession, or even a depression, will necessarily bring the issue of economic democracy back onto the U.S. political agenda. It would require a transformation of American politics to do so — and that, like the current economic crisis, would also have global implications.

This article was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 and is filed under Canadian Dimension Magazine, Economy, USA Issues and Politics.



“Perspectives on the U.S. Financial Crisis”

Comment by:

Alan L. Maki,
writing from United States on July 13th, 2008 at 7:47 am:


“Perspectives on the U.S. Financial Crisis” by Sam Gindin and Leo Panich misses a very important point in concluding: “There should be no illusion that a recession, or even a depression, will necessarily bring the issue of economic democracy back onto the U.S. political agenda. It would require a transformation of American politics to do so — and that, like the current economic crisis, would also have global implications.”

The exact same thing should be noted of Canada and every other country in the world.

In fact, Gindin and Panich, along with most of the “left” have been content to be satisfied with the concept of “many Marxisms” in the name of promoting an image of “democratic” socialism… when what they really mean is they are “free” from Communist Parties.

The result has been very weak Communist Parties incapable of carrying out the role of uniting the national working classes into a powerful international working class movement capable of challenging capitalism in its most advanced and decadent stage—imperialism— with everything sacrificed on the alter of corporate profits controlled through the national corporate interests by state monopoly capitalism.

It is very apparent and obvious that the Canadian working class is light-years ahead in thinking compared to the U.S. working class. Because of very parochial, anti-communist party mind-sets on the part of many in the Canadian and U.S. left there is little if any cross-border contact between rank-and-file workers.

Unfortunately, the Communist Party USA is currently hobbled by a particularly pernicious strain of revisionist leadership which has rejected industrial concentration and thrown its lot in with the dumb donkeys of the Democratic Party instead of becoming engaged in rank-and-file and grass-roots organizing against big-capital.

With Gindin and Panich continuing to ignore the fact that building strong, vibrant Communist Parties as being an integral part of Marxist thinking, they don’t do anything to help resolve the mess they describe so well… for articulating the political problem Gindin and Panich have made an important contribution; however, without following through with a clear analysis on what needs to be done, we remain bogged down without much progress on the class struggle front.

If Gindin and Panich think the working class will make any advances without very larger, powerful and extremely influential Communist Parties, I would like to hear how they think this will be possible.

I would just close by noting that during the 1930’s, the period Gindin and Panich single out as being a period of tremendous working class advances… the Communist Party of Canada and the Communist Party USA were very powerful and influential… one need only look at the organization of the auto and steel industries to see how strong Communist Parties made the real difference in these struggles.

Now, after considering the importance that Karl Marx attached to having strong Communist Parties in every country, let us examine this statement, again, and notice what is missing: “There should be no illusion that a recession, or even a depression, will necessarily bring the issue of economic democracy back onto the U.S. political agenda. It would require a transformation of American politics to do so — and that, like the current economic crisis, would also have global implications.”

Today, where capital has become even more powerful than it was in the 1930’s; it will take even stronger Communist Parties initiating the organization of huge mass movements, working in close cooperation across borders and oceans, in order for the working classes to make any significant headway.

Gindin and Panich, in addition to their failure to acknowledge the important function and role of Communist Parties in their socialist thinking, they also fail to bring forward what Marx thought was most important and fundamental as workers struggle against capital… the property question which has left Gindin and Panich without any clear analysis or solutions to plant closures throwing millions of workers in Canada and the U.S. out into the streets. The time has come to consider public ownership of these plants… after all, the auto industries in Canada and the United States have been subsidized to the hilt by tax-payers in both countries… and workers have created all the wealth… it is only common sense that public ownership now be considered together with nationalizations of this important industry. Again, there needs to be cross-border working class unity and this probably isn’t going to happen without strong Communist Parties in Canada and the United States.

Then again, it s unfortunate that the New Democratic Party doesn’t have a companion party down here in the United States… the time has come for rank-and-file Canadian trade unionists to introduce their sisters and brothers to the benefits of a labor party… the health care issue might be the logical place to begin.

Let’s get delegations of rank-and-file trade unionists crossing the border to get acquainted with each others problems… a discovery might be made that there is much to share and learn from each other which will advance class consciousness in a way that will resolve the problem Gindin and Panich are concerned about.

Alan L. Maki,
Secretary-Treasurer,
Minnesota/Dakota District
Communist Party USA

The Murder of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg... framed by the United States government for their political beliefs

June 19 marks the 55th Anniversary of of the murder of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

The Rosenberg's were framed by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Find out the facts:

http://www.rosenbergtrial.org/

This is another sad chapter in American history that is not taught in our schools.

From the genocidal mass execution of thirty-eight Dakota Indians in Mankato, Minnesota--- executed for the crime of defending their homeland; to the brutal execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg whose only crime was being members of the Communist Party USA... the disgraceful and shameful real history of our country goes unnoticed and untold.

Cuba's Urban Agrarians Flourish

Cuba's Urban Agrarians Flourish

City Gardens Abound On Island Nation, Where 70% Of Vegetables And Herbs Are Organic

HAVANA, June 4, 2008

Seventy percent of the vegetables and herbs grown in Cuba are organic and can be found in urban gardens. (CBS/ Reinaldo Gil)





(CBS) This story was written by CBS News producer Portia Siegelbaum in Havana.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Buy local. Eat seasonal. Eat organic." All now commonplace admonitions in the United States.

But while none of these slogans are household words in Cuba, 70 percent of the vegetables and herbs grown on the island today are organic and the urban gardens where they are raised are usually within walking distance of those who will consume them. So in one blow Cuba reduced the use of fossil fuels in the production and transportation of food. And they began doing this nearly 20 years ago.

The island nation’s move to organic and sustainable farming did not arise from its environmental consciousness, although there was an element of that also. The main reason was the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba’s only source of petroleum and main trading partner at that time.

Overnight long lines formed at gas stations that all too often ran out before all their customers could fill up. Traffic was virtually non-existent. Chinese “Flying Pigeon” bicycles replaced both private and public transportation.

“Puestos” as Cubans call the produce section of their rationed grocery stores displayed only empty bins as agriculture ground to a halt. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers vanished. Tractors became relics of a former time. Oxen pulled the plows that furrowed the fields.

Finding food for the dinner table became a day-long drudge. Cubans visibly lost weight. The communist youth daily, Juventud Rebelde, ran articles on edible weeds. Daily caloric intake dropped to about 1600 calories.

Organic agriculture "made its appearance at that moment as a necessity and that necessity helped us to advance, to consolidate and expand more or less uniformly in all 169 municipalities," says Adolfo Rodriguez. At 62, he is Cuba’s top urban agrarian, with 43 years experience in agriculture.

He says there are now 300,000 people employed directly in urban agriculture without counting those who are raising organic produce in their backyards as part of a State-encouraged grassroots movement. In all, Rodriguez claims nearly a million people are getting their hands dirty organically.

With 76 percent of Cuba’s population of just under 11 million living in cities, the importance of this form of farming cannot be over emphasized, says Rodriguez.

I think that Cuba’s urban agriculture has come to stay.

Adolfo Rodriguez, urban agrarianThe urban gardens have been dubbed "organoponicos." Those located in never-developed empty lots primarily consist of raised beds. More complicated are those created in the space left by a collapsed building, not uncommon in cities like Havana where much of the housing is in a very deteriorated state and where all it takes is a heavy tropical rainfall followed by relentless sunshine to bring down a structure.

"We have to truck in the soil," before anything can be planted, explains Rodriguez. "The basic issue is restoring fertility, the importance of producing compost, organic fertilizers, humus created by worms," he says.

In a majority of cases the fruits and vegetables are freshly picked every morning and go on sale just with a few feet of where they grew. Only in exceptional cases, such as the densely population municipality of Old Havana (as the colonial section of the capital is named) do the organic fruits and vegetables travel a kilometer or so by a tricycle or horse drawn cart to reach consumers.

Lucky are the Havana residents who live near the organoponico at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue. Occupying nearly an entire city block, it grows a wide variety of vegetables, fruits and herbs, as well as ornamental plants. It will even sell fresh basil shoots for customers to plant in their own herb garden. On a recent day, customers were offered the following fresh produce at reasonable prices: mangos, plantains, basil, parsley, lettuce, garlic, celery, scallions, collard greens, black beans, watermelon, tomatoes, malanga, spinach and sweet potatoes.

Luckily for Cubans in general, organic here is not equivalent to expensive. Overhead costs are low. The produce is sold from simple aluminum kiosks, signs listing the day’s offer and prices are handmade, electricity is used only for irrigation, and no transportation other than walking from the raised beds to the kiosks is involved. The result? Everything is fresh, local and available.

Convincing Cubans to buy this produce, especially the less familiar vegetables, so as to prepare earth friendly meals, presented a hurdle. The ideal meal on the island includes roast pork, rice and beans and yucca. A lettuce and tomato salad was popular. But the idea of vegetable side dishes or an all vegetarian meal was inconceivable to most.

"We’re cultivating some 40-plus species but you have to know who your customers are," says Rodriguez. "We can’t plant a lot of broccoli right now because its not going to sell but we’re making progress." For example, he notes, in the beginning practically no one bought spinach. Now, all the spinach planted is sold. Persuading people to eat carrots, according to Rodriguez, was an uphill battle. "We had to begin supplying them to the daycare centers,” so as to develop a taste for this most common of root vegetables.

The "queen" of the winter crop is lettuce. The spring/summer "queen" is the Chinese string bean. Cuba’s blazing summer sun doesn’t allow for growing produce out of its season, even under cover, except in rare circumstances.

The saving of heritage fruits, vegetables and even animals has also gotten a boost from the urban agrarian movement. The chayote, a fleshy, pear-shaped single-seeded fruit, had virtually disappeared from the market. Now, Rodriguez says, 130 of Cuba’s 169 municipalities are growing the fruit that many remember from their grandmother’s kitchen repertoire in which it was treated as a vegetable, often stuffed and baked.

"We are working to rescue fruit orchards that are in danger of extinction," stresses Rodriguez. "We’ve planted fields with fruit species that many of today’s children have never even seen, such as the sapote. To save these species we’ve created specialized provincial botanical gardens," he explains.

Similarly, the urban agrarian movement is rescuing native animal species such as the Creole goat and the cubalaya chicken, the only native Cuban poultry species.

Currently spiraling global food prices are hitting the island hard. Cuba has been importing just over 80 percent of the food consumed domestically. The government is making more land and supplies available to farmers and this may well include chemical fertilizers and pesticides in an attempt to greatly reduce this foreign dependency.

Rodriguez does not believe this push to quickly increase agricultural output will negatively impact on the urban organic movement. Even during the 1990s, known in Cuba as the "Special Period,” he says, the potato crop continued to receive chemical pesticides and fertilizers. And even today, the 30 percent of the non-organic produce includes, for example, large-scale plantings of tomatoes for industrial processing.

"I think that Cuba’s urban agriculture has come to stay," concludes Rodriguez. "That there is a little increase in the application of fertilizers and pesticides for specific crops is normal but that’s not to say that the country is going to shift away from organic farming, to turn our organic gardens into non-organic ones."


By Portia Siegelbaum