A Coal Miner’s Grave

How to describe the horror visited on the families of the Montcoal miners?  Appalachian miners are right up there with immigrant fruit pickers as expendable labor powers for vermin capitalists like Don Blankenship.  When your bottom line is profit, and you have every motive to circumvent regulations, than “accidents” are bound to happen.  Regulations are just so many obstacles to be overcome; the way it works now they may even help to make some mines more dangerous.  Until you make the bottom line safety, safety will always come later.  But that’s not the world we live in; profit rules the day. It is, after all, why we do business.  My guess is that if the folks going into the mine were the folks making the decisions, safety would come first.  Over the years one hundred thousand miners in this country have died in such disasters at the service of someone else’s capital accumulation.  More than a few of them are in the Rustbelt’s family tree (among them my great grandfather killed in a Murray City, Ohio disaster in 1917).  I grew up with stories of miners, cave-ins, unions and strikes.  Years after my family left the mines when there was news of a disaster on the television, no matter where, my grandparents would always anxiously follow it like those affected were of their own.  I find myself doing the same.

Dwight Yoakam, of Kentucky miners stock, doing Miner’s Prayer and Hazel Dickens of West Virginia doing Coal Miner’s Grave.

The Class War by Numbers

New reports speak volumes about the state of the class war in this country.  The news?  We’re losing badly.  While the capitalists are using the crisis to further consolidate their class power the working class has yet to act in its own interests at all (the Ford vote notwithstanding).  Often times, if the past is any indicator, a fight back lags well behind the crisis.  We’re hoping that dynamic in the context of the United States at the end of 2009 doesn’t mean a generational lag, but it might.

The first is the USDA’s Household Food Security Report for 2008.  Among the findings was that 14.6 percent of all households, comprising about 50 million people, were “food insecure” sometime during the year.  For food insecure read “went hungry.”  Reminder: The United States is, by a rather big margin, the wealthiest country in the world.  50 million hungry people? Goddamn Uncle Sam.  Of those 5.7 percent are described as having “very low food security.”  If you’ve ever been in a situation of “very low food security” then you know it’s a damn scary place to be and if you have kids, well is there a more terrible place for a parent to be then the inability to feed their children?

These numbers for 2008 are up dramatically from 2007 where rates of food insecurity and very low food security were up from 11.1 percent and 4.1 percent.   Rates are higher among black and Hispanic homes and households headed by single parents.  Hunger is much worse in the South and than in the Northeast even as much more food is produced in the South than the Northeast.  Gotta love the market.  At the end of 2008 the unemployment level was 7.2% now it’s well over 10%.  Certainly the numbers now, at the end of 2009, are much worse than those reported for 2008.  We are heading into winter where there will be extra heating costs and a new round of foreclosures.  Times look to get harder in the short run, not better.  Well, Wall Street is up and eventually that will trickle down, right?

If anecdotal evidence is any indicator than the long lines at the too few Ypsilanti food banks tells a grim story.  I occasionally volunteer at a food bank that I have had to go to in the past and unscientifically I can tell you that need is through the roof in my town all the while there are fewer donations and resources available.  When I am at the DHS to sign in for my stamps the office is not crowded, there is a crowd in the office.  Rising prices, declining wages, underemployment and other factors all combine to create this crisis.  People who work, even full time, are not making enough to feed their families.  No wonder the schools are a mess; we’re sending kids to school with empty bellies.

Banks fail through their own fault and billions from the public purse gets thrown into their laps.  Apparently it worked pretty well for them since Wall Street is going on to record profits this year according to a new study.  That’s right, in the midst of the recession the banks are set to make more than they did at the height of the bubble.  While you are going to bed with a growling stomach Goldman Sachs is putting money into piles too big to count.  The top six banks have set aside 112 billion for salaries and bonuses this year.  Class war?  Is it really a war if only one side fights?  Yeah, we’re getting the shit kicked out of us big time and we better start kicking back or we’re going to be knocked unconscious.

A look at the state of the unions bodes poorly for such a fight back.  A recent study by the Center for Economic Policy Research on the state of trade unions in the country should be required reading for leftists and trade unionists.  In 1983 over 20% of all workers were in unions.  Now that number is 12.4%.  Unions in the private sector have fallen even more dramatically.  The most disheartening number from the perspective of future struggle is that the lowest rates of unionization is among workers aged 16-24.  There only 5.7% are in unions.  With numbers like that we will continue to see hunger among millions along side the fat bellies of a handful of billionaires.

It should, by now, go without saying that the Obama administration is not interested in the plight of those peckish millions.  No, their interest lies with the bloated bankers.  It took no time at all for Obama to find the will to funnel billions to the fat cats and yet there is not even a hint of that same urgency to fight the food crisis.  Of course not.  And yet folks still seem to think that Obama is some sort of closet New Dealer who only needs to be pushed a little to unveil himself.  He is not; nor is he a blank slate.  This administration has proven, and some of us would like to say “we told you so”, that it is a firmly neo-liberal one.  And neo-liberal in the face of the of the failure of neo-liberalism!  We should base our tactics on that reality otherwise “the left” will always be chasing the wind with this guy.

More numbers: 30-40,000.  That’s what is being reported as the number of additional troops Obama is about to sign off on for Afghanistan.  While it might be too late to join the current escalation, if you’re hungry and out of a job I believe that there will be a whole lot of new openings in the armed forces over the next few years as last year’s poor return from the mountains of South Asia in boxes.  Where’s my torch and pitchfork?  Where’s yours?

As The World Turns….

Well I certainly haven’t meant to be away this long.  It has been a few weeks since I’ve been able to blog and so much has happened in the world that I am having a difficult time focusing on something to write about.

There is the UAW going from spineless to spineless and toothless thanks to a six year no strike pledge given to the good folks at Chrysler (and the government at its behest) as part of a wretched new contract.  But that is awfully depressing.  Too depressing.

There is the “tension” between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government in Israel over settlements and whether the Palestinians should be “given” a state (minus the rudiments of sovereignty) or just self government (also sans sovereignty).  When I hear an American official talk about a two state solution I fear exactly the ghetto they have in mind.

After the First Gulf War the First President Bush was also keen to develop new relationships with the Arab world and even pulled out millions in loans to Israel because of…wait for it…settlement building.  Oh how far, with Peace Processia’s Good Graces, we have come.  By the time there is a Palestinian state it will fit in a post box and some Fatah leader will call it liberation.

Obama plans to go to Egypt to tell the Arab people how much we long for democracy and human rights in the Middle East.  Let’s move on from the Bush years all.  We need to look forward.  Egypt with its 1,ooo,ooo (literally) secret police is, perhaps, a curious place to make such a plea, but what’s the alternative when all of your allies are despots?  I suppose he could do it from one of the other “moderate Arab regimes”  like Saudi Arabia or Jordan, but they still have absolute monarchs (one with an English accent) so we’ll just stick with the strong man to make the democracy point lest we besmirch the Republic.  The thing about arrogance is that it never sees irony.  Obama, I’m talking about you.

Then there is North Korea where the Dear Leaders’ succession is only slightly more rigid than in Egypt.  What to say about North Korea?  Unconditional defense of a workers’ state?  “Workers’ state” has always been an unfortunate phrase in the Trotskyist canon to address a complicated social reality.   I would find it very difficult to make that claim for North Korea without choking on it so I won’t.  I’ll settle for shockingly repressive, totalitarian cul-de-sac and call it kind.

That said, it’s pretty rich for the United States to go on about defending Japan from a nuclear armed North Korea.  Last time I checked the United States was the only country to actually use a nuclear weapon.  It was used on Japan in fact- twice.  And it was done to make a point.  The question for us about North Korea is what kind of point is it trying to make with its nuclear capacity?  My guess is that it is less nihilistic than the one made to the Soviet Union by the United States on the ashes of tens of thousands of Japanese innocents in 1945.

There was the murder over the weekend of brave abortion provider George Tiller at his church in Wichita, Kansas.  He had been shot before in 1993.  His clinic had been bombed a few years earlier.  I believe Wichita is the home of a fundamentalist outfit run by Fred Phelps as well.  These are the folks who REALLY hate gay people and protest the funerals of soldiers killed in the imperial wars overseas because they died because America tolerates gay people…or something.

The only kind of religious zealots from Kansas I like have a last name of Brown and carry broadswords, but those days are long gone.  We need clinic defenses again like the early 1990’s, but there are fewer and fewer clinics to defend!  Whole areas of the country and entire states are without abortion services.  If it is not accessible what matters its legality?

There is the news that unemployment has reached near 13% in Michigan.  This is the official tally and far under counts the reality.  My extremely unemployed self would not be counted for example.  Double it and you might be getting close.  And the jobs that do exist? There are now two categories: eight dollars an hour part-time and no benefits or salaried with stock options and a company car.   There’s more of one than the other.

A new statistic says that 32+ million Americans, or about 11 percent of the total population, are on some food assistance.  This also under counts the need since, as anyone who has gone through the program can tell you, the goal of the USDA/FNS is to deny you help not give it to you.  And “help” is about $80 bucks for a single person and $280 for a family.  Good luck with that- I hope you like beans.  An even more telling statistic is that 30 million workers in this country who are not eligible for assistance because they make to much with jobs are classified as “food insecure” which I think means hungry.  Capitalism won’t pay a whole swathe of its producers enough to eat.  If I write anymore on this I am going to convince myself of the need for a socialist revolution.

Finally there is baseball.   The Detroit Tigers look to be positively post-season this year.  If Detroit is still here.  And that’s a big if.

This is a Stick Up!

Are you feeling dispossessed?  I know I am.  We often think that capitalism’s “primitive accumulation” ended with the Highland Clearances.  Far from it.  Capitalism has always gained by others’ loss.  That’s the way it works and today is no different. Such dispossession, such accumulation is at the very heart of capitalism’s modus operandi.  There wouldn’t be a United States without the continental theft and the theft of a continent’s labor.  And we aren’t alone.

In the previous decade, those booming 90’s, growth was built in large part on “accumulation by dispossession”.  Whether the dispossessed were the state economies of the East or the rights and gains of workers  “guaranteed” in the West by Social Democracy.  The privatization craze of the 80’s and 90’s as well as this decade is just such a dispossession.

It takes many forms; it is legal and it is illegal.  It is violent and it is done with a smile.  It is done by legistlature far more often than by army.  Though force is often the only tool available and the ruling class is not hesitant to avail themselves of it.  After all, free people do not willingly submit to being robbed. Alas, we are slaves.  But a slave that knows they are a slave ceases to be a slave in the same way and takes the first, giant, step to freedom.

And they don’t just dispossess the poorest and the weakest; the peasant and the wage slave.  On occasion they have sought to dispossess their strongest rivals.  Bad things happen when this goes on.  While the Cold War might have put a damper, out of class necessity, on the competition and conflict between imperial powers the “natural” state of affairs is the kind of bloody conflict of the first half of the previous century.  (How quickly the ruling classes ran to their own national institutions and banks once the crisis came upon them!)  This crisis may very well usher in new blocs of powers and fiercer competition among them.

This is especially true if US capitalism comes out of the crisis noticeably damaged.  There are emerging powers, there are contenders to the throne.  There is waiting in the wings.  There are competing (and entwined) interests between nations and national blocs whose very entanglement may well heighten competition in other areas adding even more instability to the situation.  O’Casey’s “chasis” may not be upon us, but who would say with a straight face that we, that capitalism, has moved so far forward that a repeat of the horrors of the previous century be impossible?  Not I.

Today other dispossessions are taking place.  Home after home thought to be “owned” by workers, in the millions now, are being taken back by the banks, by the capitalists.  And not just in this country, but in many of the wealthiest countries workers are finding themselves, once again, propertyless.  And only with property, with capital, comes political power.  This is especially true when our real social power, our labor, remains not our own and yet our own.  The less we flex our power, the less powerful we are.  Alienation the devil be.

Marxist economist David Harvey is fond of saying that if neo-liberalism meant, in the end, a consolidation of class power by the capitalists then in no way does this crisis signify the end of neo-liberalism, for class power and capital are being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands by way of the crisis.  How many big banks existed in the US just a year ago?  And today?

Here Harvey briefly talks a little about accumulation by dispossession; its history, its current reality and what it might mean for the class struggle.

How The Liberal Left Helps Capitalism; A Reply to “Political Affairs” on the Elections

How The Liberal Left Helps Capitalism; A Reply to “Political Affairs” on the Elections

By MN Roy

So according to Thomas Riggins, associate editor of “Political Affairs,” not voting for the pro-war and pro-Wall Street Democrats smacks of “ultra-leftism.” Surprise, surprise. For those not in the know, “Political Affairs” is the mouthpiece for the reformist Stalinists of the mis-named “Communist Party.” The latter have been making a living on the left by supporting almost any and every Democrat since Uncle Joe Stalin himself instructed the CP to support FDR in the 1930s and derail any moves on the part of the CIO in the direction of an independent labor party. All in the name of “anti-fascism,” of course. Only the biggest “fascists,” the Jim Crow “Dixiecrats,” were to be found inside of the Democratic party, and were a key component of FDR’s “New Deal” coalition since they controlled the white-only single-party South.

The immediate target of Riggins’ wrath would appear to be anti-electoral anarchist types who oppose participating in capitalist elections on principle. However, he’s probably even more aghast at those supporting the independent campaigns of Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney. For the latter are challenging the Democrats from within the electoral arena and, therefore, constitute an even bigger threat to them. And unlike Obama and the Democrats, Nader and McKinney are actually anti-war and anti-corporate. But as all graduates of the Stalin school of class collaboration know, voting against the Democrats not only constitutes “ultra-leftism” but “helps” the Republican “right” as well.

According to this “logic,” the Democrats are supposed to be on the “left.” That would come as quite a surprise, if not a shock, to them, let alone to the Wall Street swindlers and speculators who were bankrolling Obama big time even before he helped push through the “bail-out.” It would certainly raise the eyebrows of Colin Powell, Paul Voelker and Warren Buffet, hardly individuals who would give thumbs up to anything remotely “progressive.” Or maybe the “left” that Riggins is alluding to are the respectable reformists of the CP and the rest of the “progressive community” that shares their infatuation with “lesser evil” politics.” Only what’s “left” or “progressive” about voting for a party that supports the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as soaking the poor to bail out the rich. Or maybe I just don’t understand “dialectics” since I never got around to reading any of Uncle Joe’s lamentable tracts on the subject.

Of course, what all of these labels leave out of the picture is any discussion of capitalism and class. Or that the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, are a party of, by and for the capitalist class.  Only, they have a division of labor, working separate sides of the street. While one may work on Wall Street, while the other does so on Main Street, they both work for Wall Street.

No less than the musings of the mainstream media, terms like “left,” “right” and “center” are deliberately designed to prevent working people and “movement” activists from reaching any kind of radical conclusions that it is the system as a whole that is the problem, rather than the dirty doings of the “ultra-right” or the “neo-cons” around Bush and Cheney. This is more necessary than ever since both of capitalism’s candidates have essentially the same program of increased imperialist aggression abroad and making the workers pay for the crisis that capitalism caused at home. And in the midst of the on-going debacles on Wall Street, capitalism stands more nakedly exposed than ever.

Sure, there are the usual dime’s worth of differences around “social issues” that don’t cost the capitalists anything. They have to be magnified out of proportion so that there appears to be such a great divide between the Coke and Pepsi candidates. Then the reformists can hoot and holler about keeping the “ultra-right” out of office at all costs. But if they didn’t have some second-rate issues separating them, then the two-party con game would cease to function as the most effective method yet devised of maintaining the rule of the few over the many. Besides, if the rad-libs make such a big deal over this kind of stuff, it’s mainly because they gave in long ago on every issue of substance, from the war to the bail-out, in order to get the Democrats, who rolled over in the Congress “they took back,” into the White House as well.

So when all is said and done, whether the author is Thomas Riggins, Sam Webb, Judith LeBlanc, Leslie Cagan, Gus Hall or Earl Browder, it’s still the same old Stalinist shit.

Whether it’s “popular front,” “fight the right,” “ABB,” “taking back Congress,” or just plain old “lesser of two evils,” it’s still the same old Stalinist shit.

Whether it’s opposing McCain, Bush I or II, Dole, Reagan, Nixon, Goldwater or supporting Obama, Kerry, Gore, Clinton, LBJ, and every one was the “most important election ever,” it’s still the same old Stalinist shit.

And no matter how you slice it, it still stinks as far as working people and radical activists are concerned. They go into that Roach Motel of the left, otherwise known as the Democratic party, as “radicals” opposing capitalism and come out as “progressives” trying to “reform” it or work within it. So while the Gus Halls and the Michael Harringtons may leave us, there’s always a Tom Hayden or a Carl Davidson waiting in the wings to take their place, telling us that electing a Democrat will “open up more space for the left.” As if the bought-and-paid-for politician pals of Wall Street will listen to the millions who vote for them rather than the millionaires who own them.

The reformists may delude themselves that a Democrat in the Oval Office may be more susceptable to “pressure” from below than a Republican, but they seem to forget that when you get taken for granted, the way they do with the blank checks they give to the Democrats every four years, you get taken. As Bill Clinton, who they also supported, once said, “where else will they go.” Certainly not to the streets, for they all kept quiet for Clinton’s 8 years of neo-liberalism and myriad of military interventions around the world, lest the Republican “right” get back in. No doubt, they will so the same for Obama, especially as they’ve kept the anti-war movement on hold for over four years. To paraphrase one of reformism’s leading lights, Howard Zinn, it’s who is in the White House that determines who will be (or won’t be) protesting outside of it.

Of course, in each succeeding election, it keep’s getting harder to tell exactly which candidate is the “lesser,” as opposed to the “greater,” evil or who is the “progressive” and who is the “reactionary” candidate. And this year’s contest is no exception no matter how many meaningless banalities and platitudes Barack Obama throws out about “hope” and “change.” Surrounded by Carter and Clinton era cold warriors and counter-revolutionaries and Goldman-Sachs “Chicago Boys” de-regulators, and endorsed by Bush gang war criminals like Colin Powell, Obama is even less likely to deliver any “change” than a meal from MacDonalds used to claim to do.

Both McCain and Obama supported giving the crooks on Wall Street $700 billion of the workers money and dictatorial powers over it to Henry Paulson, one of their own. Only Obama and the Democrats were even more gung-ho to do so, with no strings attached, than were the Republicans. Both of them also supported giving the rest of the government dictatorial powers over the American people, since they both voted to renew the police state “PATRIOT” Act and the revised “FISA” Act. And both support the death penalty. While you wouldn’t expect to hear John McCain speaking up for the likes of Troy Davis, let alone Mumia Abu Jamal, you won’t hear a word from Obama about their cases either. Indeed when the NYC cops who murdered Shawn Bell got off scott-free, Obama admonished his supporters in the Black community not to resort to violence!

Both McCain and Obama support George Bush’s “war on terror,” want to increase spending on the war machine and the size of the military to fight it, maintain the occupation of Iraq and intensify the war in Afghanistan. Both agree with George Bush that the “surge” was such a smashing success, that such a shift in focus is now, not only possible, but, desirable. Only Obama and the Democrats, who have been beating the drums for a bigger and better war in Afghanistan long before McCain jumped on board the band-wagon, sugar-coat it by calling it “withdrawal.” Obama’s even called for a “surge” of 15,000 troops in Afghanistan to make better use of the handful of combat troops he wants to “redeploy” from Iraq. And let’s not forget their shared enthusiasm for rocket-rattling against Iran and Russia. Only McCain, not Obama, is willing to negotiate with Iran over uranium.

Both McCain and Obama staunchly support Israel’s “right” to oppress the Palestinians, invade Lebanon and bomb Iran any time they please. Both just as strongly oppose the governments of Cuba and Venezuela. Only Obama went out of his way to condemn the Cuban revolution as constituting a “dark age” in that country’s history. Does that mean that he thinks that the rule of the US-backed dictator Batista and the gangster Meyer Lansky was a “golden age” for Cuba. It would indeed be strange for a Black man to think that, since Jim Crow was the law of the land under Cuban capitalism just as it was under American “democracy.”

Both McCain and Obama oppose any kind of real national health care plan or any other substantial increase in social spending since both of them voted to give away the farm to Wall Street and the Pentagon. Besides both are agreed that belt-tightening 1970s-style austerity is the only game in town insofar as working people go since the corporate crooks that support both of them aren’t about to pay for the crisis that they and their system caused.

Only it seems that more of them support Obama than McCain! They know that Bush and his gang of “neo-con” nit-wits have, in the words of last time’s “lesser evil,” John Kerry, “fucked it up,” and its time to change dicks if they’re going to keep screwing us. Whether its reflected in the amount of campaign contributions from Wall Street or endorsements from the likes of Colin Powell, most of the ruling rich feel that Obama, not McCain, is the preferred candidate for implementing austerity at home just as he is viewed as being the better man for the job of refurbishing the empire’s credentials abroad. I may be a little old-fashioned, but I didn’t think that it was the job of the “left” to help improve the image of imperialism!

After all, who better to bomb dark-skinned peoples around the world and who better to gave working people the short end of the already shortened stick, and Black working people the shortest end of it, than some-one who actually looks like them. As Democrat David Dinkins, the first Black mayor of NYC said, before he laid waste to the municipal budget and largely Black work-force at the behest of Wall Street, “they’ll take it from me.” No doubt behind closed doors Obama has re-assured his wealthy backers and supporters along those same lines. Only when he does it, it will be in the name of “shared sacrifice” and “national unity” since the “united we stand” rhetoric of the “right” no longer does the trick.

So then, who really helps the “right,” or rather the ruling class, in implementing their common class agenda of increased aggression and austerity? Those who oppose it and the Democratic party politicians that are a key component of implementing it or those who tell you to vote for those same Democrats year in and year out? Who was responsible for putting the anti-war movement on the back burners in 2004 and 2006 in order to elect pro-war Democrats? Who is responsible for demoralizing and demobilizing the thousands of radical activists who took on the system believing that “another world is possible” to the point that many of them would fall for the sound byte shenanigans of Obama? Who helps the mainstream media, even if only in a small way, in keeping any thinking about capitalism (and class struggle against it) out of working people’s minds in favor of meaningless monkey chatter about “progressive” versus “reactionary” politicians when the whole system is reactionary to the core? And who actually helps drive people into the arms of the “right” by associating the “left” with the neo-liberal austerity promoted by the Democrats at the behest of Wall Street. To ask the question is to answer it.

The only way to really fight “the right,” that is the capitalist class, is by building a strong and independent left that has a program and party to do so. You wouldn’t tell workers to vote for their boss to represent them at their jobs, so why tell them to vote for their bosses’ candidates to represent them in Washington, or anywhere else, for that matter? Now, more than ever, it’s time to make the break; to vote against Wall Street and its wars, to vote for Nader or McKinney, and begin to build a movement of, by and for the working class and against capitalism. Only to do so it will be necessary not only to break with the Democrats, but with their “progressive” apologists and hanger-ons, including and especially Thomas Riggins and the CP.

An Instruction, to be Inculcated in the Working People from Early Life

A CATECHISM by Paul Lafargue (hat tip to MRZine for another of Lafargue’s “religious” writings)

That Is to Say, An Instruction, to be Inculcated in the Working People from Early Life.

Q. What is your name?

A. Wageworker.

Q. Who are thy parents?

A. My father was called Wageworker; my mother’s name is Poverty.

Q. Where wast thou born?

A. In a garret under the roof of a tenement house which my father and his comrades built.

Q. What is thy religion?

A. The Religion of CAPITAL.

Q. What general duties does thy religion enjoin upon thee?

A. Two principally: first, the duty of Abnegation; second, the duty of Toil. My religion commands me to abdicate my rights to all property on earth, that common mother of us all, to the treasures she bears in her womb, to the product of her surface, to her wonderful fertility through the light and the heat of the sun; it commands me to abdicate my rights of property in the product of the labor of my hands and my brain. My religion commands me to toil from early childhood to my dying day – to toil by sun light, gas light, or electric light, by day and by night; to toil on the earth, under the earth, and in the waters that are under the earth; to toil everywhere and evermore.

Q. Does thy religion lay upon thee any other duties?

A. It lays upon me the further duty of self-denial and privation; to still my hunger only partially; to pinch all my physical wants; and to suppress all my mental aspirations.

Q. Does thy religion forbid thee to taste of certain articles of food?

A. It forbids me to touch game, poultry and meat unless they are of fourth rate quality, and it forbids me to taste at all the better qualities of fish, wine or milk.

Q. What food does it allow thee?

A. Bread, potatoes, beans, herrings, the refuse of the butcher shops and also sausages. To the end that I may stimulate my exhausted strength, it also allows me adulterated wines, beer and similar liquors.

Q. What duties does thy religion lay upon thee with regard to thyself?

A. To retrench my expenses, to live in narrow and spare rooms, to wear torn, tattered and patched up clothes, until they actually fall off my body in shreds. To go about out at toes and heels and without stockings, exposed to the wet and the soilure of the streets and roads.

Q. What duties does thy religion lay upon thee with regard to thy family?

A. To deny my wife and daughters all ornaments of elegance and good taste; to cause them to be dressed in rude materials and with barely enough to escape being hauled up by the police for indecent exposure. To teach them not to shiver in the winter in calicos, and not to smother in the summer in close or topfloor rooms, under tin roofs heated with the heat of the Dog Days. To inculcate in my little ones, from their tenderest years, the sacred principle of toil, to the end that they may be able to earn their living from early childhood, and not become a burden upon society; to teach them to go to bed without a light and supperless; and to accustom them to the misery that is their lot in life.

Q. What duties does thy religion lay upon thee with regard to society?

A. To increase the national wealth – first through my toil, and next through my savings as soon as I can make any.

Q. What does thy religion order thee to do with thy savings?

A. To entrust them to the savings banks and such other institutions that have been established by philanthropic financiers to the end that they may loan them out to our bosses. We are commanded to place our earnings at all times at the disposal of our masters.

Q. Does thy religion allow thee to touch thy savings?

A. As rarely as possible; but it recommends to us not to insist too strongly upon receiving our funds back; we are told we should patiently submit to our fate if the philanthropic financiers are unable to meet our demands, and inform us that our savings have gone up in smoke.

Q. Who is thy God?

A. CAPITAL.

Q. Has He existed since the beginning of time?

A. Our most learned high priests, the official political economists, say He exists since the creation of the world. At first, however, He was very little, hence His throne was usurped by Jupiter and other Gods. But since about the year 1500, He grew daily into power and glory, and to-day He rules the world according to His will.

Q. Is thy God omnipotent?

A. Yes. His grace can grant any and all enjoyments. When He turns His countenance from a person, a family, a country, they are smitten with misery. The power of the God CAPITAL increases with the increase of His bulk. Daily does He conquer new countries; daily does He enlarge the swarms of His vassals, who devote their lives to the mission of increasing His power.

Q. Who are the chosen ones of thy God?

A. The Capitalists – manufacturers, merchants and landlords.

Q. How does thy God reward thee?

A. By furnishing work to me, my wife and my children, down to the youngest.

Q. Is that thy only reward?

A. No. Our God allows us to help still our hunger, by looking through the large pier glass windows of stylish restaurants, devour with our eyes the delightful roasts and delicacies that we have never tasted and never will taste, because these viands are there only for the nourishment of the chosen ones and their high priests. Out of His kindness we are also allowed to warm our limbs, numb with cold, by affording us occasional opportunities to admire the soft fur and the thick-spun woolen cloths exhibited in large stores and intended for the comfort of the chosen ones and their high priests only. He also grants us the exquisite joy of regaling our eyes, on the streets and public resorts, with the sight of the sacred crowds of Capitalists and Landlords, to admire their sleekness and roundness, together with their gorgeously decked lackeys and footmen as they drive by in brilliant equipages.

Q. Are the chosen ones of the same race as thyself?

A. The manufacturers and landlords are kneaded out of the same clay as myself, but they have been chosen out of thousands and millions.

Q. What have they done to deserve this elevation?

A. Nothing. Our God manifests His omnipotence by bestowing His favors upon those who have not earned them.

Q. Then is thy God unjust?

A. CAPITAL is the incarnation of Justice; only, His justice passeth our understanding. CAPITAL is omnipotent. Were He compelled to bestow His grace upon those who earned it, He would be weakened, because then His power would have limits. Consequently, He can show His power in no stronger way than by picking His favorites from among pickpockets and idlers.

Q. How does thy God punish thee?

A. By sentencing me to idleness. From that moment I am ex-communicated; I then know not where to find food, or where to lay myself down. From that moment I and mine must perish with hunger and want.

Q. What are the sins that call this punishment upon thy head ?

A. None. CAPITAL throws me out of work whenever it pleases Him.

Q. What prayers does thy religion commend to thee?

A. I pray not with words. My prayer is LABOR. The bare utterance of any other prayer would interfere with my actual prayer – LABOR. This is the only prayer that profits, because it is the only one that pleases CAPITAL and that produces surplus values.

Q. Where do you pray?

A. Everywhere. On the fields and in the work-shops; in mills and mines; ashore and at sea. To the end that our prayer be granted, we are in duty bound to lay our freedom, our dignity, our will at the feet of CAPITAL. At the ringing of the bell, at the whistling of the machine, we must hasten to congregate, and, once engaged in prayer, set our arms and legs, hands and feet in motion like automata, we must grunt and swear, we must strain our muscles and exhaust our nerves. At our prayer meetings we must submit with humble mien and patiently to the ill-temper and insults of the boss and his foremen; they are always right. We must never utter a complaint if the boss lowers our wages and raises our hours of work; everything he does is right, and is done for our best. We must consider it an honor if the boss takes undue liberties with our wives and daughters. Rather than ever to allow a complaint to escape our lips, rather than ever to allow our blood to boil, rather than ever to think of striking, we should submit to all trials, swallow our bread moistened with our own spittle only, and drink dirty water to wash that down. Should we be impertinent enough to dare find fault with such treatment, then would our masters scourge us with the prisons and penitentiaries, sharp-cutting sabres, repeating rifles, cannons, policemen’s clubs and even the gallows. They would clap us behind the bars if we were to grumble; they would mow us down if we were to do aught that is contrary to the decrees of the laws which they have enacted and promulgated.

Q. Do you expect any reward after death?

A. A very great one. After I am dead CAPITAL allows me to lie down and rest; I am then freed from hunger and cold, and from the fear of want forevermore. I then enjoy the eternal peace of the GRAVE.

There Is No Alternative? More Thoughts on the Finance Crisis

I start any thinking on the economy by rejecting the capitalist parameters.  Capitalism can be understood, it can be overcome.  So when folks talk about the choice being the bailout or catastrophic financial collapse I won’t be defined by those options and the left shouldn’t either.

Lot’s of Republicans who voted against the bailout have raised some pretty strange views on socialism as reason for their resistance to it.  Socialism is NOT bailing out banks.  If this were actually a move to nationalize the banks instead of giving them a handout I might be more supportive.  It is not, despite what some junior Congressmen may say. Nothing about this bill challenges capitalism.

The leaderships of both parties and the White House couldn’t get this through this time, not because of a knee-jerk American reaction against state intervention in the economy, but because it is rightly seen by a good deal of the public as $700 billion to get the fat cats out of the squeeze they got themselves into and they did not want to face an electorate in a few weeks this angry.  There is real RAGE in the country at the minute.  The government is trying to counter that rage with a campaign of fear.

When propelling the country into war in 2002 and early 2003 these same parties painted the invasion of Iraq as an either or as well.  Either we invade Iraq or we will find out, in the form of a mushroom cloud, how wrong we were in not invading Iraq.  Well, what a choice!  They are now saying the same thing about the bailout and point to the 770+ point drop on Wall Street to prove it.

Never mind that many of these stocks are over valued anyway and much of the value in the market is based on speculation and, as was clear yesterday, emotion.  Why all of a sudden this crisis?  Was there no crisis before the bailout was rejected?  Certainly the crisis in capitalism, not the vote in the House is responsible for the mess.

Now does that squeeze affect the rest of us?  Sure, we live under capitalism- it always affects us.  That is why workers have to take out loans to live; the capitalists have drove down wages so much over the last several decades that workers can’t live without debt. How about that catastrophe?  We have been living under it for years now.

We do not have to abide by their arguments.  If the government really wants the economy to improve for millions of workers they could start by using that $700 billion in massive public works; quality, free public housing, a new coast-to-coast public transportation system, a new public health clinic in every neighborhood, a program of environmental clean up and the retooling of the energy infrastructure for solar power would be a couple of good places to start.

I am sure that a “compromise” will be found and the bankers will get their money (did any one notice the $25 billion given to the auto companies over the weekend?).  The capitalization of the credit markets is only a part of the problem.  The fundamental problem in the economy is the driving down of wages and living standards for workers.  This was the goal of neo-liberalism, and capitalism true to its contradictory form, has screwed itself while screwing the rest of us.

There are solutions to this mess but, in the medium and long run, they can’t be found in the dynamics of capitalism.  Any real solution has to put these predatory practices out of business, not recapitalize them so they can start the awful process all over again.  Nor is the solution simply in the stabilization of the finance markets- even an immediate infusion of capital into the banking system brings with it its own set of potential catastrophes (like a jump in inflation).

Unfortunately this isn’t the end of capitalism.  There have been serious crises before.  Capitalism has shown itself to be far more resilient than we have, at times, given it credit for.  The lessons of the previous crises should be underlined. Without an organized working class in political opposition the capitalists have been able to get out of their crises on their terms.

The reforms that have been squeezed from that system in the past are a by-product of that opposition, their repeal a testimony to the lack of opposition.  The creation of that class opposition is our task and it is urgent.

The left may not be able to affect the immediate outcome of the debate in Washington, but we can enter the debate around the country with our vision; the productive forces of our society developed by the producers themselves for the public good and not private enrichment.

If we don’t, at some point, win that debate we will forever hobble from crisis to crisis all the while the human and natural resources of the world are exhausted, bled white from the logic of capitalist accumulation.  The currently posed “alternatives” are just more coal into the furnace of a runaway train.  Either we stop this train or, at some point, it goes over a cliff.

Some Thoughts On The Finance Crisis

Like a lot of folks I have spent the last couple of weeks reading all kinds of stuff.  Pulling Mandel and Marx off the shelf.  Looking at old Sweezy and reading everything I can from current Marxists.  As to the crisis caused by the pyramid scheme of selling bad debt that the big banks have gotten themselves into.  Let ’em fall.  The more the institutions of finance capital collapse the better off the world will be, if not in the short run.

What is credit to a worker anyway?  Starting in the mid-70’s and the neo-liberal offensive real wages started to drop.  Credit became an increasingly important “income” of workers as they sold their future labor power to make up for the gap with the hope that a rise in wages would make up for the debt.  Unfortunately  the labor market has also been unkind to US workers as the capitalist’s offensive opened up new labor pools, especially in manufacturing, that have helped to continue the downward pressure on wages.

The purchasing power of workers declined.  The general capitalist contradiction of the working class not being able to afford all of the useless commodities produced by an unplanned, anarchic system, causing a crisis of “under consumption”.  The huge surpluses liberated from society by neo-libralism were trying to find profitable places to go.  In the 90’s these surpluses went into the new technologies markets. That bubble burst at the end of Clinton’s term.

The twin crises of “under consumption” and an “outlet” for the surplus was “solved” by the housing boom brought on by the funneling of the surplus into the credit markets.  But the loans can’t be paid back; so you bundle the loans and sell them to another financial institution to, you guessed it, leverage for more credit.  Bad debt piles on bad debt and that bad debt is sold and resold to keep it capitalized. The bubbles burst with both the housing and credit industries collapsing.

If you sold your future labor with the hope that it would pay off with a rise in wages, the opposite happened.  Your future labor that you “banked” on is worth even less than it was ten or fifteen years ago.  The debt can’t be paid off, not with a whole lifetime, because wages aren’t rising.  Workers are always behind and wage slavery means not just a slave to this week’s pay check, but to the next 30 years of paychecks.

The market in debt took off with the rise in credit.  Banks were at pains to loan out more and more, selling the debt to recapitalize and…sell more debt.  This is, well, a pyramid scheme.  How much is debt worth that can’t be paid back.  Not much.  So the banks find themselves screwed,  Banks won’t lend to other banks because the credit in which this was leveraged with has no value anymore.  To get out of the mess the banks are demanding $700 billion from the government to recapitalize and, yep, sell more debt.

Why in the world would any worker favor getting the banks out of this crisis, even if it allowed workers to gain a new credit line?  The problem, for workers, is declining wages brought about in part by the globalization of increasing parts of the labor market.  To solve that crisis workers have to organize across national boundaries in a struggle to increase wages.

As for the banks.  Fuck ’em.  The values they claim to hold are all so much smoke and mirrors.  Expropriate all of them.  All debt for workers is toxic.  Cancel all of the debt that can’t be paid back and put the speculators in jail, create a single national bank co-operative.  Begin to make “despotic inroads on the rights of property” is what I say.  Think of the lives they have ruined after workers lose their homes, the chance of retirement and the future education of their children.  What price on that?

What about the inflationary pressures of this huge influx of capital into the financial markets?  On what basis will workers have access to new lines of credit?  To pay off old ones?  Or will most workers be denied new credit at all as the new regulations deny credit to those without the income potential to pay it back?  To say nothing of the other unsaid of this whole process; the massive concentration of capital in fewer and fewer institutions.

I know that the crisis is a lot more complicated than the one I laid out here.  The operations of the financial institutions are so Byzantine as to make my head spin.  It is impossible to get the real story from them.  I hope to come up with a reading list and post it here. The crisis has been a learning experience for me- I reread Marx’s Capital with the help of David Harvey over the summer and that has helped to contextualize this crisis within the process of capitalist accumulation, but I am no economist Marxist or otherwise.

Politically, we do have lessons to draw out from all this of course. The Democrats are united with the White House in facing down the only institutional opposition to the bailout; the “free market” Republicans.  How whack is that?  The Keynesian (sans social democracy) winds are blowing .  The left, long accustomed to battling on the terrain of neo-liberalism will need to prepare itself for a confrontation with the “managed” capitalism that may come out of this crisis.  The capitalists are learning too.  FDR once claimed that the New Deal’s purpose, and this is no New Deal, was to “save capitalism from itself”. Why in the world would we ever want to be a party to that?