Campaigning for Democracy And Socialism |
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March 17, 2023: The Week in Review
Deja Vu All Over Again: Nationalize the Banks
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The cartoon to the left is a two-way gallows humor reminder.
First, we're always told that Marxism is dead and buried, and certainly of no use now if it ever was.
Second, every few years, capitalism inflicts another crisis on us, frequently about bank failures, runaway inflation, and the like.
Our economic pundits, or most of them anyway, display surprise. Why is this great mystery dumped on our laps once again? How did this happen? In a short time, a few of them will go to their bookshelves and dig out the relevant volumes of Das Kapital to search for an explanation. They usually find it, and write a few columns to make themselves appear profound. But in a few months or years, the crisis subsides, and Marx is returned to the dimmed bookshelves again.
We can give them some credit for dusting off Marx in these times. But the ball is in our court to educate a new generation of organic intellectuals of the working class, our own thinkers and analysts who will keep Marx out of his grave. But like Marx, we need to use his ideas as a method, not as dogma oridelogy. The future is open, and Marxism will find new things in the process of highlighting our path to a new order. Put it to work.
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WE ARE INVITING FEEDBACK!
Please send us your letters, comments, queries, complaints, new ideas. Just keep them short and civil. Longer commentaries and be submitted as articles.
DIFFICULTY READING US?
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We're going to try something new, and you are all invited.
Saturday Morning Coffee!
Started in August 2020, then going forward every week.
It will be more of a hangout than a formal setting. We can review the news in the previous days' Leftlinks, or add new topic. We can invite guests, or just carry on with those who show up. We'll try to have a progressive stack keeper, should we need one.
Most of all, we will try to be interesting and a good sounding board. If you have a point you would like to make or a guest to invite, send an email to Carl Davidson, [email protected]
Continuing weekly, 10:30 to Noon, EDT. The Zoom link will also be available on our Facebook Page.
Meeting ID: 868 9706 5843
Let's see what happens!
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Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
2023 Commemoration
Friday, March 24 (2023
11:30AM to 1:00PM
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Silencing Dissent:
How the Military-Industrial Complex Dominates the Conversation and What We Can Do About It
Webinar
March 21, 2023, 8 pm Eastern
Joan Roelofs presentation will be based upon the theme of her most recent book, The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why There Is So Little Anti-war Protest in the United States (Clarity Press, 2022).
Professor Emerita of Political Science at Keene State College, Joan Roelofs has been an anti-war activist ever since she protested the Korean War. She has been associated with the Pledge of Resistance, Monadnock Greens, Greens/Green Party USA, NH Peace Action, World Beyond War, The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, and Code Pink.
Sponsored by the Move the Money Task Force (MTM) of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS). MTM seeks to shift funding from the Pentagon budget to underserved and unmet domestic needs.
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Last Week's Saturday Morning Coffee
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News of the Week, Plus More
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Chart: Figure 1
Consequences and Lessons of the New U.S. Bank Collapses
By John Ross
Guancha.cn via MROnline
Mar 15, 2023 - The collapse in rapid succession of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, the second and third largest bank collapses in U.S. history, fully confirms the extremely damaging character of the U.S. stimulus policies which were launched to attempt to deal with the economic consequences of the Covid pandemic.
Indeed, the path from the errors of these stimulus packages to the collapse of the two U.S. banks is a particularly direct one. This, therefore, reinforces the importance of all circles in China understanding the errors of these policies – this is necessary as, unfortunately, some sections of the media in China have supported the type of erroneous stimulus packages launched in the U.S. and suggested that China should copy them.
This article will explain an apparent paradox. Why did these two banks collapse due to their involvement with what are generally regarded as the safest of all financial assets, U.S. Treasury bonds, and one of the riskiest of all financial instruments – crypto currencies?
U.S. Propaganda Compared to U.S. Economic Reality
In its recent political propaganda, the U.S. has been claiming that its economy was doing well and the stimulus packages it launched during Covid were a big success. President Biden had done press conferences to make such claims. But anyone following money, and not words, knew this was not true. In addition to underlying negative structural trends in the U.S. economy financial markets were also sending out extremely clear signals of economic problems.
The most important of these was what might appear a very technical issue but is in fact deeply significant – so much so that it is well worth non-economists understanding it for reasons that can be explained in a short way. Readers will rapidly find out why this apparently technical issues in fact has extremely strong practical consequences. This issue is the inversion of the U.S. yield curve – that is, the creation of a situation where the interest rates on US long term bonds are lower than short term ones. As shown in Figure 1 (above) this is an extremely rare event, having only occurred four times in the last forty years, and is one of the clearest and most reliable indicators of serious problems in the U.S. economy.
Figure 1 shows over the long run the relation between U.S. long term, 10 year, and short term, two-year bond interest rates – that is, how much the two interest rates differ. As can be seen, almost always U.S. long term interest rates are higher than short-term ones. This is logical because the risk of lending money over a long period is greater than over a short period – so a greater reward, a higher interest rate, has to be paid to get someone to lend money for a longer period. But, as can be seen, on four occasions this normal relation has changed and short-term interest rates became higher than long term ones. On each of the three previous occasions this event, the inversion of the yield curve, was followed by very serious problems in the U.S. economy.
- When the yield curve inverted in 1989 this was followed by a recession in 1990.
- When the yield curve inverted in 2000 this was accompanied by the severe dot com share price collapse and a sharp slowdown in the U.S. economy.
- The inversion of the yield curve in 2006 was followed by the collapse of the U.S. sub-prime mortgage market, the 2008 financial crisis, and a severe U.S. economic recession.
What is notable is therefore not only the rareness of this indicator of yield curve inversion but also its reliability – that is, there are no occasions on which the yield curve inverted and this was not followed by a major crisis. It is because it is such a reliable indicator, and because it has always been followed by such severe economic consequences, that it is worth even non-economists paying great attention to this issue.
Therefore, when in July 2022 the U.S. yield curve inverted, this was a very clear signal that serious problems were developing in the U.S. economy. Furthermore, this inversion continued to worsen until it reached a peak of -1.09% on 8 March 2023. This was clearly indicating a serious problem and therefore that all the claims in words that everything in the U.S. economy was doing well were false.
From Yield Curve Inversion to the U.S. Banking Crisis
The mechanisms that drove this inversion of the yield curve led directly to crises in both the Treasury bond market and in cryptocurrencies – and through them to the bank collapses.
In order to attempt to deal with the economic consequences of the Covid pandemic, the U.S. launched large purely consumer focussed stimulus programs. As, by definition, consumption is not an input into production this meant that an enormous boost was being given to the demand side of the U.S. economy, but no direct increase was being given to the economy’s supply side. The result of a huge increase in demand and no increase in supply was inevitable – rapid inflation.
In order to create the consumer stimulus, the U.S. government increased its borrowing by an extraordinary 26% of GDP in a single year. Almost all this money was used to stimulate consumption, that is demand, and very little to increase investment, that is supply as well as demand.
Simultaneously the U.S. broad money supply was increased by 26% in a year.
The result was that between the 4th quarter of 2019, that is immediately before the pandemic, to the 4th quarter of 2022, that is the latest available data, U.S. consumption rose by a large $3,769 billion, but U.S. net investment, that is, taking into account depreciation, fell by $93 billion. This produced the sharp increase in demand (consumption) with no increase in supply (investment).
As a result, U.S. inflation began to rise rapidly – increasing from 0.1% in May 2020 to 7.5% in January 2022. This timeline showed clearly that inflation was being created by U.S. economic policy and not by the Ukraine war – as that war did not break out until February 2022. U.S. Inflation then reached a peak of 9.1% in June 2022.
Raising Interest Rates
To attempt to control this inflationary wave the U.S. Federal Reserve then began to rapidly raise interest rates. These interest rate rises were the mechanism that led to the simultaneous crisis in the Treasury Bond markets and that for crypto-currencies – these in turn creating the bank collapses. ...Read More
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Video: Where is Powell? Where is Yellen? Stop this crisis NOW. Announce that all depositors will be safe. – David Sacks, PayPal co-founder and Silicon Valley libertarian commentator, 3/10/2023
Silicon Valley Bank and All That
By Bill Barclay
DSA's Democratic Left
MARCH 15, 2023 - OK. We can all enjoy some schadenfreude as the Silicon Valley techno-libertarians discover that maybe there is a role for government, after all. Especially when their money in Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) might vanish. Of course, it didn’t. It didn’t because those burdensome government agencies decided to make them whole, 100 cents on the dollar, including the more than 90% of deposits that were above the $250,000 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insurance limit.
How Did SVB Get Into This Mess?
In 2015, Greg Becker, then and now the CEO of SVB, appeared before Congress and argued that failure to “relax” the capital requirement of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act (which aimed to ensure that banks would have enough capital on hand to meet obligations) would “stifle our ability to extend credit to our clients.”
Three years later, in 2018, under the Trump administration, Congress complied. New legislation raised the level of exemption from the “stress tests” applied to “systemically important banks” such as JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, etc., from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. In a stress test, the assets and liabilities of a bank are run through extreme but possible scenarios, such as what would the bank’s situation look like if interest rates were to double or triple in a short time period.
Such a test should have raised flags about SVB but we don’t know how much attention the results would have received. In the following three years, SVB assets increased more than 250% to just under the new threshold, an increase largely driven by deposits from an aggressive campaign to get new tech startups to use SVB to park their cash and to take out loans.
So What Is the SVB (and Signature Bank) Story?
In essence what happened to SVB and later Signature Bank in New York is an old-fashioned bank run. Modern banking is based on faith – that your money will be there whenever you want it. This faith allows banks to profit using a very traditional banking model of paying lower interest to depositors and lending at higher rates to businesses, households, etc.
But this run-of-the-mill bank run occurred at a very unusual bank (Signature Bank, much smaller than SVB, shared some but not all of SVB’s traits. Like SVB, most of the deposits in Signature were above the $250,000 FDIC-insured level. The customer base was also concentrated, in this case law and real estate firms. Signature also had a significant percentage of deposits from the crypto sector.)
The business model of SVB worked well – until it didn’t. SVB took in large amounts of deposits from a narrow customer base of tech start-ups and tech entrepreneurs and loaned, by the bank’s account, to almost half of all venture-capital-backed technology and life-science companies in the United States.
Some tech innovators and their companies kept their deposits at SVB because the condition for a loan included the requirement for depositing working cash in the bank. Some just liked the creative startup vibe from CEO Becker, described on the SVB web site as a champion of the innovation economy. And Becker also had influence and power outside the world of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, serving since 2019 as a Class A director of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. His picture was removed from the Bank’s website and his seat was declared vacant on March 10, the day SVB collapsed.
The Financial Environment Changed
Thirteen years of very low-interest rates following the 2008 financial crisis meant a low cost of capital for the exciting world of Silicon Valley startups, encouraging more and more such ventures and fueling the growth of SVB when other, larger banks were reluctant to loan to these companies. However, the sharp downturn in the tech sector in 2022, the crypto-crash, and the Federal Reserve Bank’s (the Fed’s) obsession with fighting inflation created a very different financial environment. The tech sector was hit particularly hard by the rapid series of interest-rate hikes engineered by the Fed, chaired by Jerome Powell. Companies in the Valley could no longer get the low-cost capital they needed to operate. The only money they could get were their deposits in SVB. As the draw on SVB’s deposits grew, so did worries about the bank’s financial situation.
Meanwhile, Powell assured Congress – on March 6, four days before the FDIC seized SVB – that the Fed’s interest rate hikes posed no risk to the financial sector. Moody’s and S&P continued to give SVB an investment grade rating.
CEO Becker was a little smarter than Powell or the rating agencies. Two weeks prior to the collapse, he sold $3.6 million of SVB stock. Several executives also made strategically smart stock sales in the weeks leading up to the collapse. The Department of Justice has announced an investigation into these trades.
Contagion – Or Maybe Not
But of course, what we really want to know is the question of “financial contagion.” Are SVB and Signature Bank only the first dominoes to fall, the Lehman and Bear Sterns of a new financial crisis? This is a more complex question than the simple description of what happened.
On the one hand, they are relatively small banks. Yes, I know, everyone is saying SVB is the biggest bank failure since 2008. but SVB, at about $250 billion in assets, is less than a tenth of the size of the largest bank, JP Morgan-Chase. However, SVB is of sectoral importance, which is probably the reason that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen invoked the “systemic risk exception” in bailing out the bank.
But, beyond the issue of size, there is another very important difference between SVB and Bear, Lehman, and AIG, etc., in 2008. SVB apparently has no derivative or other transactions with the larger banking community. Thus, containing the risk should be rather straightforward, and the decision to make all depositors whole is a big step in that direction. Will this be sufficient? That is yet to be seen. Many other FDIC-covered banks are sitting on large unrealized bond losses, estimated at more than $600 billion at year-end 2022.
But there is a larger question for progressives to think about and to try to insert into the realm of political discourse. If we, the citizenry at large, are going to bail out the tech innovation sector when it makes bad financial decisions, shouldn’t we get some of the upside when one of the “unicorns” succeeds? It may be that technological innovation is too important to leave to bankers and Silicon Valley libertarians, that we begin to think about the socialization of investment.
The finger pointing has only begun. But to paraphrase the old adage that “there are no atheists in a foxhole,” it is clear that there are no libertarians in a financial crisis. ...Read More
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'Champion for Working Families': Bernie Sanders Backs Brandon Johnson for Chicago Mayor
Johnson "is not afraid to stand up for strong unions and make big corporations and the rich pay their fair share," said the Vermont senator.
By Jake Johnson
Common Dreams
March 16, 2023 - U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday endorsed progressive Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson in Chicago's mayoral race, calling the former public school teacher a "champion for working families" and touting his support for taxes on the rich to fund critical social services.
In a statement, Sanders said Johnson "is not afraid to stand up for strong unions and make big corporations and the rich pay their fair share to invest in affordable housing, quality healthcare, better schools, and good jobs."
"Brandon understands the struggles of working people, and is prepared to address them, and that is why I am proud to endorse his campaign for mayor of the city of Chicago," the Vermont senator added.
Johnson is set to face conservative Democrat Paul Vallas, a notorious school privatization advocate, in Chicago's April 4 mayoral runoff.
The progressive candidate said he is "honored to have the support of Senator Bernie Sanders in this campaign."
"This campaign is about fighting for working people, and that is what Senator Sanders has done his entire life," Johnson said in a statement. "Together, we will deliver the change we need to secure better schools, safer neighborhoods, affordable housing, quality healthcare, and support for working people across this city."
Sanders' endorsement came on the same day that powerful Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.)—whose electoral maneuvering and policy positions have frequently clashed with the Vermont senator's—threw his support behind Johnson.
HuffPost reported Thursday that "Clyburn, a prodigious fundraiser, has been 'bundling,' or gathering campaign donations for Johnson for weeks now, according to the Johnson campaign."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Reps. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) have also backed Johnson over Vallas. ...Read More
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Democrats in Michigan Are Showing National Democrats How To Actually Wield Power
Democrats usually waste their electoral majorities. So it’s shocking when the party uses its power to actually pass progressive and pro-worker legislation, as it just did in Michigan — including repealing the state’s right-to-work law.
By Luke Savage
Jacobin via Portside
March 15, 2023 - For several decades now, a basic political dynamic has recurred in Washington. Afforded political power, Republicans push their agenda as fiercely and aggressively as possible, using every tool at their disposal. Among Democrats, something like the opposite is more typically the case. Awarded a sweeping mandate in 2008 and a governing trifecta in 2009, to take a recent example, Barack Obama and his administration refused to go to the mats for the public option for health care, refrained from overhauling America’s financial system, and backed away from promised reforms that would have made it easier for workers to organize unions.
The same has often been true at the state level. As Thomas Frank observed in his 2016 book Listen, Liberal, many solidly blue states are effectively governed from the technocratic center-right. After their landslide midterm victory in 2010, meanwhile, Republicans newly elected to governors’ mansions and statehouses across America quickly moved to transform erstwhile Democratic bastions into laboratories of conservative policy. In both Wisconsin and Michigan, historic strongholds of the American labor movement, a barrage of anti-worker laws soon followed.
With a red trifecta at his disposal, Michigan’s then-governor Rick Snyder took aim squarely at the state’s unions and rammed through sweeping “right-to-work” legislation. As State Senator Darrin Camilleri described it:
There was no hearing, there were no public availabilities. They passed the entire thing in one day. The governor signed it behind closed doors because they knew what they were doing was incredibly unpopular. The people of Michigan did not wanna see a change in our workplace protections and our union intentions.
Notwithstanding its unpopularity, the effort had the intended effect: union membership in Michigan has since dropped by 40,000, total union density (already down significantly from nearly 30 percent in 1989) had fallen by several percentage points to 15 percent as of last year, and wages have stagnated — rising but well below the rate of inflation.
Elected with their own governing trifecta last November — the first of its kind in forty years — state Democrats are now, refreshingly, pursuing a version of Snyder’s strategy in reverse. In a single day alone, ignoring the anguished cries of their Republican counterparts, Michigan’s Democrat-controlled legislature passed a new gun control law, voted to repeal the state’s unenforceable abortion ban, and enshrined protections for LGBTQ citizens. Significantly, legislation to end the state’s Snyder-era right-to-work law was just passed through the Michigan house and senate and is now on its way to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s desk for approval.
Democratic representative Regina Weiss, the bill’s lead sponsor in the house, made a forceful speech in favor of its passage earlier this month, arguing: “Right-to-work was never about freedom — it was simply about control,” quoting Martin Luther King Jr’s famous declaration, “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.”
Other Democrats, like Representative Joey Andrews, have similarly mounted a full-throated case for workers’ rights and against right to work, which Andrews rightly calls “part of a larger political strategy envisioned by employers, advocated by their allied network of lobbyists and think tanks.”
Particularly in light of recent history, these developments are worth celebrating. Having won a governing trifecta for the first time in nearly half a century, Michigan Democrats are moving with real urgency to implement a progressive and pro-worker agenda. And rather than equivocating or trying to frame that agenda in purely managerial terms, liberal lawmakers like Weiss, Camilleri, and Andrews are actually defending it with clarity and ideological confidence. ...Read More
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The Backlash to Black Power
Stopping the Repeat of Historical Deconstruction
By Jamala Rogers
Black Commentator
March 15, 2023 - It’s intensifying. I’m referring to what Peniel Joseph calls the backlash to the Third Reconstruction. His latest book of the same name chronicles the cyclical and violent white backlash to Black progress in this country. You can see the highly coordinated, racist strategy being conducted across the country as I type - just as it has been in previous periods - to prove that Black people are unworthy of citizenship and incapable of governance. This is the unadulterated justification for upholding white supremacy by any means necessary.
Missouri and Mississippi are the latest targets of the rightwing steamroller in state legislatures. With Republicans totally dominating these legislatures, they are aggressively carrying out the calculated plan to derail the political and economic agenda of Black folks. All that cannot be taken back will be discredited or destroyed.
What’s happening in St. Louis, MO, and Jackson, MS is almost identical because it’s coming right out of the same GOP playbook. The two cities are the blackest in their respective states so it’s no accident that they are in the crosshairs.
Both have Black mayors struggling to implement progressive agendas in a hostile, anti-Black environment. Both cities are plagued by high crime rates whose root causes can be found in the capitalist features of poverty, broken educational systems, and income inequalities. Mayors Tishaura Jones and Chokwe Antar Lumumba are constantly being battered by the white establishment for not controlling crime. Or as I say, for not having a safe space for whites when they want to come into the urban center.
In Jackson, MS - home of the man-made water crisis - House Bill 1020 was passed by the white House of Representatives and if it becomes law, the white chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court would get to appoint two white judges to oversee a new white district within the city. The white state attorney general would appoint four white prosecutors, a white court clerk, and four white public defenders for the new white district. The white state public safety commissioner would take over an expanded Capitol Police force, currently run by a white chief. They can use their white power to neutralize the blackity Black scene they find so repulsive. The white attorneys general stand ready to reinforce or intervene with white heavy-handed authoritative action.
In St. Louis, woke voters have been consciously dismantling the white power structure of a southern kind. Now the mayor is Black. The prosecutor attorney is Black. The comptroller is Black. The congresswoman is Black whose district covers the city. This is an unacceptable situation for white folks who need to be in control.
The white Missouri House of Representatives voted for a bill that allows the white governor to appoint a white special prosecutor to take over the duties of the democratically elected city prosecutor when violent crime reaches a certain threshold. HB 301 states that the white governor gets to determine that “a threat to public safety and health exists” based on reviewing certain crime statistics. Translated, this means when white folks feel unsafe coming into the city for their recreation and socializing.
The persistent struggle of African Americans for racial equity, inclusion and prosperity continues to elude us. The factors that led to the failure of the first Reconstruction were racist violence (by white citizens and police), suppression of the Black vote, the removal of democratically-elected and appointed Black officials, the enactment of repressive laws and policies, the lack of enforcement of existing laws to protect Black citizens and the indifference of white people to the horrifying situation.
It’s past time for Black people and our allies to intensify our struggle to defend our rights and our progress. It’s time to seriously engage in direct action and disruption. It’s time to make the lives miserable for those who are stripping us of our power because they can. The white state rep who introduced the House bill in Missouri lives on the other side of the state. Why is he acting like he’s concerned about safety in a St. Louis?!
The carefree lives of people who are depriving and denying Black self-determination must suffer some discomfort and a whole lot of inconvenience. Commerce must be disrupted - no more business as usual. Literally.
The millions of dollars made when white folks come into the cities for sports, concerts, and conferences must be blocked. We will not concede to this modern-day states’ rights agenda of white supremacy that takes the power from Black elected officials and leaves them with a title and no authority.
History can repeat itself and those who don’t know their history are often doomed to repeat it. We know what happened after the first and second Reconstructions. It’s time to write an ending that gives life and meaning to Black citizenship and Black futures. ...Read More
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Digging Deeper into the Current Conjuncture: |
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Photo: Police guarding Grand Jurors in Georgia
Behind The Scenes of Trump Grand Jury; Jurors Hear 3rd Leaked Trump Call
By Tamar Hallerman
and Bill Rankin
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The bomb-sniffing dog was new. The special grand jurors investigating interference in Georgia’s 2020 elections hadn’t before seen that level of security on the third floor of the Fulton County courthouse where they had been meeting in secret for nearly eight months.
Oh, God, I hope it doesn’t find anything, one juror recalled thinking as the German Shepherd inspected the room. “It was unexpected. We were not warned of that,” she said.
The reason for the heightened surveillance was the day’s star witness: Michael Flynn, former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. An election denier who suggested martial law should be imposed to seize voting machines in Georgia and other swing states where Trump lost, Flynn had only agreed to appear after being compelled to by two courts in his home state of Florida.
Fulton law enforcement was taking no chances on that unseasonably warm December day, concerned about who might turn up to protect Flynn, a prominent figure among far-right, conspiracy theorist and Christian nationalist groups. Outside, on the courthouse steps, sheriffs’ deputies and marshals carrying automatic weapons kept watch.
No bomb was found. Flynn, who was ultimately the last witness jurors heard testimony from, went on to assert his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer many of prosecutors’ questions.
But the experience brought home to some jurors just how important and consequential their work could be.
The jurors’ identities have been a closely guarded secret. The AJC confirmed their service using pay stubs from Fulton Superior Court, the special grand jury handbook given to them on selection day and other court documents.
The jurors discussed details surrounding their eight months on the panel but declined to talk about their internal deliberations or share their indictment recommendations.
In an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, five of the 23 special grand jurors recounted what it was like to be a pivotal — but anonymous — part of one of the most momentous criminal investigations in U.S. history; one which could lead to indictments of former President Donald Trump and his allies.
“One of the most important things we’ll be a part of in our life was this eight-month process that we did,” one juror told the AJC. It was “incredibly important to get it right.”
Over two hours, in a windowless conference room, the jurors shared never-before-heard details about their experiences serving on the panel, which met in private, often three times a week.
They described a process that was by turns fascinating, tedious and emotionally wrenching. One juror said she would cry in her car at the end of the day after hearing from witnesses whose lives had been upended by disinformation and claims of election fraud.
For months, they were unable to talk to friends, family members and co-workers about what they were doing. They said the overall panel was diverse, with different races, economic backgrounds and political viewpoints represented.
Many emerged with heightened respect for election workers and others who kept the state’s voting integrity intact. ...Read More
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Photo: Katie Hobbs holds a campaign event at the Carpenters Local Union 1912 headquarters on November 5, 2022, in Phoenix, Arizona, ahead of her gubernatorial win. KEVIN DIETSCH / GETTY IMAGES
Arizona Governor Vetoes Bill Banning Critical Race Theory
Republican Lawmakers in Arizona Have Attempted to Ban Critical Race Theory Three Times So Far
By Zane McNeill
Truthout
March 16, 2023 - Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) recently vetoed a Republican-backed education bill that would ban public K-12 schools from teaching critical race theory (CRT) to students.
CRT is a legal academic discipline that began in the 1980s. In 2020, the far right co-opted the term CRT, weaponizing it as a boogeyman in the latest culture war pushed by Republicans. Currently, more than 18 states have enacted policies targeting CRT, according to Education Week.
Most notoriously, in 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which prohibited educators from teaching lessons on race or LGBTQ issues.
In an interview with NPR, renowned legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw, who coined the term CRT, said that she regards far-right attacks on the legal discipline as an attempt to erase history and deteriorate democratic processes.
“The attack on our democracy and the attack on anti-racism are one and the same,” she said.
Arizona’s Senate Bill 1305 was the most recent attempt by Republicans in the state to punish schools that teach topics relating to race, ethnicity, discrimination, political dissent, and historical oppression.
If Hobbs had signed the bill into law, educators teaching at Arizona public universities found to have violated the law would have been subjected to a $5,000 fine.
“It is time to stop utilizing students and teachers in culture wars based on fearmongering and unfounded accusations,” Hobbs said in a statement to state Sen. Warren Petersen (R), president of the state senate. “Bills like SB1305 only serve to divide and antagonize.”
SB 1305 is only the latest attempt by Arizona Republicans to pass a CRT ban. Previous Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) had signed a CRT ban into law in 2021, but that bill was later voided by the Arizona Supreme Court as unconstitutional. In 2022, Republicans again attempted to pass an anti-CRT law, but were unable to secure enough votes to advance the bill.
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne (R) responded to Governor Hobbs’s veto by launching a hotline that parents and students can use to report educators who are teaching CRT or lessons on emotions and identity. Horne served as Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction from 2003 to 2011 and as the state’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2015. In 2012, Horne was investigated for campaign violations and was fined $10,000. In 2022, voters re-elected him for another term as Superintendent.
Arizona Republic reports that Horne’s “Empower Hotline” was a campaign promise he ran on during the 2022 election. In his previous position as Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, Horne pushed lawmakers to effectively ban ethnic studies in the state in 2010. In 2017, a federal judge overturned the ban, finding it discriminatory and unconstitutional. ...Read More
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Top China And US Envoys Speak With Ukrainian
Foreign Minister About War’s Outlook
Dmytro Kuleba has calls from both Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday
Beijing focuses on promoting peace talks, while Washington continues to pledge aid in combating Russian invasion
By Laura Zhou
South China Morning Post
March 17 , 2023 - Senior diplomats from China and the US each spoke with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on Thursday, with Beijing vowing to promote peace talks between Kyiv and Moscow while Washington pledged enduring aid to repel Russia’s invasion.
In Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang’s telephone conversation with Kuleba, according to the ministry, Qin told him that “China is concerned about the protracted and escalating crisis and the possibility of it getting out of control”.
“It is hoped that Ukraine and Russia would keep the door open for dialogue and negotiation, and not close the door to a political settlement – no matter how difficult and challenging it may be,” Qin was quoted in the readout as saying.
It comes amid reports that President Xi Jinping will visit Moscow next week, and that talks with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky could follow.
Beijing will continue to push for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, a Chinese envoy to the United Nations said, amid reports that President Xi Jinping is to visit Moscow next week.
Speaking at a Security Council meeting on Tuesday, Geng Shuang, China’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, also cautioned against the Sinophobia and the zero-sum-game mentality of “politicians in individual countries” that he said would drag the world into another crisis, according to China News Service.
“They are biased and suspicious of China, selling anxiety and creating tension,” Geng told representatives at the discussion, without directly naming the United States or other Western powers.
“If a country’s policy towards China is kidnapped by Sinophobia, it will only cling to a zero-sum-game mentality and pursue containment and suppression, leading to conflict and confrontation,” he said.
“The world has already been thrown into chaos by the Ukrainian crisis – do they want to create another one to change the world beyond recognition?”
China released 12-point position paper on 1-year anniversary of Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Geng said dialogue was “the only viable way out” of the war in Ukraine, and that Beijing was willing to “play a constructive role” to push for a political settlement based on its 12-point position paper. China released the paper on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month.
There has been speculation that Beijing – which brokered a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran last week – could try to play a more active role in mediating an end to the conflict in Ukraine.
Citing people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal on Monday reported that Xi, whose unprecedented third term as Chinese president began last week, plans to have a virtual meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
It would be the first time Xi has spoken with Zelensky since Russia invaded Ukraine. The talks would likely take place after Xi visits Moscow, reportedly next week, when he is expected to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Beijing has not confirmed the talks with Zelensky or Xi’s trip to Moscow. When asked on Tuesday, foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said only that Beijing had been in communication with Russia and other parties.
US President Joe Biden on Monday said that he also expected to hold talks with Xi soon.
Russia invaded Ukraine 1 year ago. What has happened so far?
Tuesday’s UN Security Council meeting was convened at the request of Moscow to highlight what it called Ukraine’s “Russophobia”, which Russian representative Vasily Nebenzya said had become the country’s “bulwark ideology”. That claim was challenged by representatives from the US, the UK, and Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder, who said the term was “a form of imperial propaganda and an attempt to justify Moscow’s war crimes in Ukraine”.
Geng told the meeting that phobias had become “the logical premise and policy pretext with which certain countries create imaginary enemies, concoct threat theories, pursue containment and suppression and stoke division and confrontation”.
He said that as a result, “differences are artificially magnified, divisions are one-sidedly highlighted, contradictions are fixed and reinforced, and the world is dragged into a swamp of conflict and strife”.
Geng added that wars could not be ended by estrangement, prejudice and hatred. ...Read More
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Photo: Cuba's President Raul Castro (R) stands next to China's President Xi Jinping (L) in Santiago de Cuba July 23, 2014. Xi ended an eight-day trip through Latin America on Wednesday with a visit to eastern Cuba, where both the island's independence struggle against Spain and Fidel Castro's revolution began.
China And Progressive Latin America
Share a Project of Solidarity
Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez was invited by the World Anti-imperialist Platform to speak on 4 March 2023 at Bolívar Hall, London, alongside the ambassadors of Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, at an event marking the 10th anniversary of the death of comrade Hugo Chávez.
Carlos addressed the accusations so often levelled at China that it is a new imperialist power in Latin America. He gave a brief history of US imperialism in Latin America in the postwar era, and compared that with China’s engagement with the region. He notes for example that, in stark contrast with the US, “China has precisely zero military bases in Latin America and the Caribbean. It has sponsored no coups, waged no wars, imposed no sanctions, and engaged in no destabilisation, economic coercion or propaganda.”
We reproduce the text of the speech below.
By Carlos Martinez
Since the themes for today are Latin America and the global anti-imperialist struggle, and since I’m here representing Friends of Socialist China, I’d like to talk about the relationship between China and Latin America, and in particular the accusations levelled by certain Western politicians – echoed in the media, and unfortunately also in some parts of the left – that China is a neo-colonial or imperialist force in Latin America.
These accusations have been repeated to such a degree that they’ve acquired the force of accepted truth.
Every US government over the last 20 years and more has sought to sabotage the rising economic and political ties between Beijing and the countries of the region – the US’s “back yard”, or as upgraded by Biden, “front yard”.
And the line they use is, approximately: be careful of those Chinese, they’re imperialist! The US Secretary of State under Trump, Rex Tillerson, directly accused China of being a “new imperial power” in Latin America. Hillary Clinton and Antony Blinken have leveled similar accusations.
Clearly, we need a frame of reference. What does modern imperialism look like in Latin America? What examples do we have of a foreign power imposing political and economic domination on the countries of the region?
There are a few well-known examples.
The US-sponsored coup in Guatemala in 1954, which overthrew the popular and democratic government led by Jacobo Arbenz.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, in which the US trained, supplied, and transported Cuban exiles to overthrow the revolutionary government in Havana.
US support for the vicious coup in Brazil in 1964 that overthrew the government of João Goulart. The US went on to provide consistent support to the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for the next two decades.
The US was deeply involved in the process of undermining and destabilising the Allende government in Chile from 1970-73. Henry Kissinger famously talked about the need to “make the Chilean economy scream”. The CIA was involved in the military coup that removed that government, and the US came to be a top supporter of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Indeed Chile in the 1970s was the site of the first early experiments in the application of neoliberal economics: whilst Pinochet’s soldiers were engaged in a campaign of murderous repression against communists, socialists, trade unionists, democrats and indigenous people, the so-called Chicago Boys group of economists, along with the likes of Milton Friedman, were given free reign to organise the Chilean economy along the lines of free-market fundamentalism.
The US was a strong supporter of the military regime in Argentina from 1976.
The US was the primary motive force behind the Contra War in Nicaragua in the 1980s. A decade-long war that was waged to punish the people of Nicaragua for pursuing a path of socialism and sovereign development. That war would never have taken place were it not for the backing of the CIA and the State Department.
The Contra War was financed in no small part by cocaine trafficking conducted by the Contras and actively facilitated by the CIA. There’s a direct line between that war of regime change in Nicaragua, the crack cocaine epidemic in the US, and the War on Drugs which has been waged against the peoples of Latin America and oppressed communities within the United States.
But maybe that’s all ancient history? We’ve only gone as far as the late 1980s. Maybe the imperialist leopard has changed its spots since then?
Sadly not. In April 2002, the US was involved in an attempted coup against the government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. And it has consistently, over the course of more than 20 years, attempted to destabilise Venezuela and punish the Venezuelan people for their path of revolution.
The US was behind the coup in Honduras in 2009 that brought down the government of Manuel Zelaya.
In Brazil, the US provided explicit and implicit backing for the lawfare coup against Dilma Rousseff, paving the way for four years of quasi-fascism under Jair Bolsonaro.
The US is up to its neck in subversion and destabilization against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
It applies illegal, unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
The US has never given up on the idea of using economic suffocation, in the form of a criminal blockade that is rejected by the whole world, in order to foment counter-revolution in Cuba. This strategy has been in place for over 60 years. Albert Einstein reportedly said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, the US ruling class is insane.
The US has 76 military bases in Latin America and the Caribbean. It uses sanctions, destabilization, coups, economic coercion and propaganda in order to buttress its domination, in order to create a “favorable business environment”, to make sure that it can maintain its control over the region’s natural resources, its land, its markets, and its labor.
So, we know what modern imperialism looks like in Latin America.
Does China’s involvement in the region look anything like that?
China of course has precisely zero military bases in Latin America and the Caribbean. It has sponsored no coups, waged no wars, imposed no sanctions, and engaged in no destabilization, economic coercion, or propaganda.
Where the US uses every trick in the book to attack the progressive and socialist countries of the region – most notably Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua – China has excellent relations with those countries. Indeed Chinese support is extremely important to those countries.
What China does a lot of in Latin America is trade and investment. Bilateral trade has multiplied by a factor of 40 or so over the course of the last 20 years. Chinese investment has multiplied by five.
Out of 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, 21 have signed up for the Belt and Road Initiative.
Is this imperialism?
The countries of the region certainly don’t think so. China is very purposefully and specifically helping other countries of the Global South to break out of underdevelopment. To break out of precisely the underdevelopment that colonialism and imperialism have held these countries in for 500 years.
Chinese investment is building schools, hospitals, housing, railways, energy infrastructure, telecoms infrastructure, ports, roads. This means creating a situation where the countries of the region are able to modernize, to upgrade their economies, to produce more, and meet the needs of their people, without having to give up their sovereignty, without having to accept a permanent position at the bottom of the global economic hierarchy, which is what the US offers them.
For example, China provided the technology for Bolivia – a small and poor country – to launch its first satellite, which now provides internet and phone signal to the whole of the country. China invested in the project; China brought its technical expertise to the project. But the satellite belongs to Bolivia.
The Bi-Oceanic Railway, which was conceived of jointly by Xi Jinping and Eco Morales, will run from the Pacific coast of Peru, through landlocked Bolivia, to the Atlantic coast of Brazil. This is a project that’s directly contributing towards continental integration.
China’s support and solidarity have been essential in the fight against Covid-19. Of all the Covid vaccines taken in Latin America, a majority have been supplied by China. Actually in 2021 I attended a speech by Bolivian president Luis Arce in this very hall. He said that in Bolivia’s hour of need at the height of the pandemic, the US did nothing for them. Europe did nothing for them. They needed vaccines – Bolivia is a country where around half the population works in the informal economy, they can’t just switch to remote working! Who came to the rescue with vaccines? It was China, Russia, and Cuba.
Critics will argue that China is engaged in business, not charity. And it’s true – generally speaking, Chinese companies invest with a view to sharing in the profits. But, very different from the West, China deals with other countries on the basis of equality, respect for sovereignty, and mutual benefit. When China invests in projects, there’s none of the economic coercion that’s associated with Western lending institutions and the IMF. There’s no loan conditionality, no conditions of austerity, privatization, liberalization or de-unionization.
So we have to conclude that the label of imperialism simply is not a good fit.
What do Latin Americans themselves think? What do the leaders of the working peoples in the region think about China?
Hugo Chávez, who we’re honoring today, was certainly a great friend of China, visiting six times over the course of his presidency. He said about Chinese socialism: “We’ve been manipulated to believe that the first man on the moon was the most important event of the 20th century. But no, much more important things happened, and one of the greatest events of the 20th century was the Chinese revolution.”
Chávez talked about an alliance between progressive Latin America and China as being a “Great Wall against American hegemonism.” He said: “China is large but it’s not an empire. China doesn’t trample on anyone, it hasn’t invaded anyone, it doesn’t go around dropping bombs on anyone.”
Trade with China, and investment from China, have been hugely important in helping Venezuela to roll out its social programs, which have transformed the country.
Fidel Castro is someone that knew very well what imperialism looks like – he dedicated his entire life to fighting against it. He said that “China has objectively become the most promising hope and the best example for all Third World countries … an important element of balance, progress and safeguarding of world peace and stability.”
China’s friendship has been very important to Cuba. The two countries are cooperating on a number of biomedical and renewable energy projects. While the US imposes its crippling blockade, China extends assistance and solidarity, most recently donating 100 million dollars to help Cuba recover from a series of natural disasters.
So the accusations of Chinese imperialism simply do not stick. They have no basis in reality. Why then do they exist? Why do we hear them so often? Not just from the ruling class but, tragically, from parts of the left? ...Read More
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New Journals and Books for Radical Education... |
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From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University
Essays on the Ongoing Transformation of Higher Education
Paperback USD 17.00
This is a unique collection of 15 essays by two Purdue University professors who use their institution as a case-in-point study of the changing nature of the American 'multiversity.' They take a book from an earlier time, Upton Sinclair's 'The Goose-Step A Study of American Education' from 1923, which exposed the capitalist corruption of the ivory tower back then and brought it up to date with more far-reaching changes today. time. They also include, as an appendix, a 1967 essay by SDS leader Carl Davidson, who broke some of the original ground on the subject.
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Social Justice Unionism
25 Years of Theory and Practice
By Liberation Road
This new 222-page book is a collection of articles and essays covering 25 years of organizing in factories and communities by Liberation Road members and allies.
It serves as a vital handbook for a new generation of union organizers on the left looking for practical approaches to connect their work with a wider socialist vision.
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Revolutionary Youth and the
New Working Class
The Praxis Papers,
the Port authority Statement, the RYM Documents and Other Lost Writings of SDS
Edited by Carl Davidson
A Collection of 12 essays featuring some of the most creative and controversial work of
the U.S. New Left
of the late 1960s.
Most items are difficult to find, and in one important case, The Port Authority Statement, written in 1967 to replace the Port Huron Statement, appears here for the first time. Important for today's radical youth.
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NOT TO BE MISSED: Short Links To Longer Reads... |
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Photo: Dorsey Hager, head of the Central Ohio Building Trades Council
America’s $52 Billion Plan to
Make Chips at
Home Faces a
Labor Shortage
In Ohio, a bipartisan push to build more fabs needs more workers—and quickly.
By Shawn Donnan
Bloomberg News
March 9, 2023 - If you want to see what Joe Biden has called his “field of dreams,” head to the intersection of Clover Valley Road and Miller Road in Licking County, Ohio.
Once you get there, you peer through a chain-link fence and around grassy berms at what on a recent gray winter morning looked like a sea of mud with a few bulldozers and some construction workers in hard hats and high-visibility vests. The cows in the nearby barn seemed more interested in their feed than the economic revolution unfolding next door.
Within a few months, those few dozen workers will grow into thousands, all assembling what the US president in his most recent State of the Union address promoted as one the most advanced semiconductor fabrication plants on the planet.
The $20 billion Intel Corp. is pouring into that farm field is the fruit of a bipartisan federal effort. It aims to revive domestic chip production to ease what’s become a dependence on Asian imports and also to counter China’s drive to displace the US as the world’s tech superpower.
Plans for Intel’s complex in Ohio, its first major stateside project in 40 years, call for as many as 10 fabs to be built over a decade or more. An initial pair, due to be completed by 2025, will employ 3,000 workers. Putting up those buildings will require even more bodies: 7,000, give or take, according to company projections.
America’s biggest foray into industrial policy since World War II faces one big hurdle that hasn’t gotten much attention but is becoming apparent at Intel’s Ohio outpost. Historically, the US has thrived because it’s had ample pools of labor—for reasons good (immigration) and bad (slavery).
But the time has arrived when America’s demographics are conspiring against its economic ambitions.
It’s been only six months since the groundbreaking ceremony, but Intel’s lead contractor is already scrambling to find workers. Catherine Hunt Ryan, president of manufacturing and technology at Bechtel Corp., says the project’s need for electricians and pipe fitters “is significantly outstripping the supply of labor in the local area.” Bechtel expects to import at least 40% of the workers it needs from outside the Columbus area, including other states. An additional 30% will be apprentices working their way through union programs.
Intel isn’t alone. Right now the US doesn’t have enough cooks, assembly line workers, nurses, teachers, truck drivers, police officers, firemen, welders—the list goes on.
Unemployment is the lowest it’s been in more than half a century, while the number of job openings is near an all-time high. The upshot: In January there were 5.1 million more positions available than people to fill them, according to researchers at the St. Louis Fed. ...Read More
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Photo: Strikers march with signs that say “UAW on strike” outside a glass facade. At the New School, adjunct professors will now be paid $6,520 for a three-credit course. Credit...Juan Arredondo for The New York Times
Strike Ends at the New School and Parsons School of Design
Adjunct faculty had walked out over wages and compensation for work outside the classroom. The private school had faced a lawsuit from parents.
By Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura
Part-time faculty members at the New School have agreed to end a grueling three-week strike over pay and benefits after reaching an agreement late Saturday with the university.
The sizable walkout had left the school at a near standstill. Classes were canceled because nearly 90 percent of the faculty is made up of untenured adjunct professors and lecturers. The school had also been facing a lawsuit from irate parents, who had threatened to withhold payment or force their children to transfer to other institutions. Some had called for the school’s president, Dwight A. McBride, to resign.
The instructors had argued that they had received only a meager increase in their salaries over recent years, despite inflation and the strain of the pandemic. They also said that a disproportionate amount of university expenses went toward the salaries of administrators, even though enrollment had been rising in recent years.
“We have countersigned a tentative agreement and the strike is ending,” the union representing the part-time faculty, the ACT-UAW Local 7902, wrote on Twitter. Union members said that compensation was still not on par with those at comparable institutions in the city but that all their demands over health insurance had been met.
They said that the new contract would see pay rates rise by 13 percent in the first year for the best-paid adjuncts. An adjunct being paid $5,753 over a semester for a three-credit course — the ceiling until now — would earn $6,520. By the fifth year, the adjunct would receive $7,820, a 36 percent rise.
Labor Organizing and Union Drives
United Farm Workers: Decades after Cesar Chavez made the union a power in California fields, it has lost much of its clout. Membership dropped precipitously, from 60,000 to 5,500. It hopes a new law will turn the tide.
A New Inquiry?
A committee led by Senator Bernie Sanders will hold a vote to open an investigation into federal labor law violations by major corporations and subpoena Howard Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, as the first witness.
Whitney Museum: After more than a year of bargaining, the cultural institution and its employees are moving forward with a deal that will significantly raise pay and improve job security.
Some adjuncts at Mannes Prep and Mannes conservatory, a part of the New School, would receive a 31 percent raise in the first year of the contract. ...Read More
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Smartmatic May Complete The One-Two Punch That Knocks Out Fox
By Katie S. Phang,
MSNBC Columnist
March 15, 2023 - In the opening paragraph of a nearly $3 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, we encounter this brilliant expression of the truth: “The Earth is round. Two plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election for President and Vice President of the United States. The election was not stolen, rigged, or fixed. These are facts. They are demonstrable and irrefutable.”
Fox News faces two massive defamation lawsuits. Taken together, the cases pose lethal threats to the network’s bottom line.
You might assume the company filing suit here is Dominion Voting Systems. But no. The above paragraph is from the New York defamation lawsuit by Smartmatic, an election and software technology company, against Fox News, Fox Corp. and some of the network’s hosts, as well as former President Donald Trump’s personal counsel Rudy Giuliani.
That means Fox News faces two massive defamation lawsuits: one from Dominion Voting Systems and the other from Smartmatic. Taken together, the cases pose lethal threats to the network’s bottom line.
Smartmatic alleges in its $2.7 billion lawsuit that Fox News and the other defendants broadcast more than 100 knowingly false statements about the company’s involvement in the 2020 election. (It’s seeking that amount because it claims it has lost more than $2.7 billion in value since the 2020 presidential election.) According to Smartmatic’s complaint, the defendants repeated, on at least 13 different broadcasts, the following false narrative:
“Smartmatic was a Venezuelan company under the control of corrupt dictators from socialist countries. In [the defendants’] story, Smartmatic’s election technology and software were used in many of the states with close outcomes. And, in [the defendants’] story, Smartmatic was responsible for stealing the 2020 election by switching and altering votes to rig the election for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
New revelations from unsealed court documents between Fox News and Dominion.
Despite attempts by the defendants to get the lawsuit dismissed, the New York Supreme Court confirmed last month that Smartmatic can move forward with its claims against Fox News, hosts Maria Bartiromo and Lou Dobbs, and Giuliani.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that as discovery proceeds and depositions are taken, Smartmatic, as Dominion already has, will have an opportunity to accuse Fox of not only defaming the company, but also deceiving its viewers all in the pursuit of profit. In Smartmatic’s case, the evidence will show that the network’s executives, anchors and hosts didn’t believe the baseless conspiracy theories about election and voting fraud but continued to promote those lies on its shows and even allowed guests such as Giuliani and Sidney Powell to repeat their dishonesty, thereby implicating Smartmatic. ...Read More
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From the CCDS Socialist Education Project... |
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A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project and Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity orders from [email protected]), or order at :
The book is a selection of essays offering keen insight into the nature of China and its social system, its internal debates, and its history. It includes several articles on the US and China and the growing efforts of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
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Taking Down
White Supremacy
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
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Multi-Dimensional Man
Herbert Marcuse Was The Philosopher
of The Future In An Age Without One.
By Oliver Eagleton
New /Statesman
March 11, 2023 - Asociety threatened by collapse needs to adopt a kind of historical double vision. We must recognize the terminus of our current political trajectory – climate breakdown, mass immiseration, nuclear conflict – without assuming its inevitability or foreclosing alternative scenarios. In our projection of the future, what is probable must coexist with what is possible. This requires a careful synthesis of realist and utopian sensibilities. For the left, it means deflating optimism while rejecting defeatism, countering melancholia with hope and vice versa.
If there is a thinker from the last century who most clearly embodies this ambivalence, it is Herbert Marcuse: the “Father of the New Left” whose writing oscillated from dark reflections on the prison house of late capitalism to dazzling images of its transcendence. His famous depiction of the postwar settlement as a consumerist death spiral, which created the conditions for collective flourishing while thwarting any attempt to realise it, has the same tone of impotent frustration that inflects much commentary on today’s ecocidal order. Yet he also provided a framework for imagining the future as an open and contestable space – a philosophical discourse beyond the end of history. Hence the critical theorist Fredric Jameson’s enthusiastic assertion: “This is certainly the time for a Marcuse revival!”
The pace of the Marcuse publishing industry appears to confirm this point. In recent years we’ve seen several collections of scholarly essays, transcripts of lectures, book-length studies and even a graphic biography – all of which stress his contemporary relevance. The latest text of this revivalist movement is perhaps the most substantial and compelling. Written by a one-time friend and student of Marcuse, Andrew Feenberg’s The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing presents its subject as, among other things, a prophet of 21st-century environmentalism: someone who “would have felt right at home with the school strike and Extinction Rebellion”. Marcuse, Feenberg reminds us, was a trenchant critic of modern scientific rationality and the ecological destruction that it wrought. He was convinced that the domination of man was inseparable from the domination of nature, and that both must be supplanted by a new, post-capitalist ethos – which could only be theorized by venturing outside the Marxian tradition, into existentialism and Freudianism.
The origins of these ideas can be traced back to Marcuse’s early life. The eldest child of a successful Jewish textile-trader, he was born in Berlin in 1898 and received a classical gymnasium-school education before being drafted into military service at the age of 18. Having ruined his eyesight reading the major works of the French and German avant-garde, Marcuse was unable to fight on the front line and was instead stationed at the national Zeppelin Reserves, slipping out every so often to attend lectures at Berlin University.
The war radicalized him despite his distance from it. By November 1918 a sailors’ revolt in Kiel had catalyzed a wider insurrection against the imperial state, and he was elected to the Reinickendorf soldiers’ council, attending political meetings with the anti-military revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The following month he was dispatched to Alexanderplatz as part of a citizens’ armed security force and ordered to return the fire of counter-revolutionary snipers. “I must have been crazy,” he later said of the experience, noting his relief at returning to his studies once the uprising had been crushed.
For Marcuse, the revolution failed because German working-class consciousness was not sufficiently advanced; Luxemburg and Liebknecht’s strategy relied on a broader cultural shift that had not yet taken place. To forecast what that shift might look like, the young scholar spent the early days of the Weimar Republic hosting bibulous “existential evenings” in his family living-room, discussing the contours of a truly revolutionary subjectivity, informed by modernist poetry and theatre, with Walter Benjamin, Walter Hasenclever, Adrien Turel and occasionally Georg Lukács. After completing his doctorate on 19th-century German literature, he immersed himself in the study of Karl Marx and Friedrich Schiller, searching for a link between the critique of political economy and the realm of sensuous experience. If the former could be rooted in the latter, he contended, then perhaps one could begin to speak of a subjective basis for socialism: a communist theory of man.
The breakthrough came in 1927 with the publication of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, which Marcuse hailed as “a turning point in the history of philosophy” and submitted to intricate, line-by-line analysis. He sought to politicize Heidegger’s distinction between an “inauthentic” existence – in which one has an unreflective relationship to one’s own life – and “authentic” being, in which one recognizes the full range of one’s existential possibilities. For Marcuse, capitalism imposed inauthenticity on most human beings by subordinating them to its abstract laws of economic motion. Authenticity, by contrast, was the capacity to see the latent potential within this historical matrix: the perception that it can be changed through praxis. If the natural and social sciences generally confined themselves to the first domain – studying things as they are – Marxism and phenomenology belonged to the second: seeing things as they could be.
Marcuse was among Heidegger’s small group of advanced students at Freiburg University, yet the pair were forced to go their separate ways in 1932. Marcuse accepted the futility of pursuing an academic career in an increasingly Nazified Germany and relocated to Geneva, taking up an invitation to work with Max Horkheimer’s Frankfurt Institute for Social Research: the neo-Marxian outfit that would soon establish the field of “critical theory”. Heidegger, meanwhile became a card-carrying fascist and began peddling Führer-friendly interpretations of his doctrine. (Critics argued this position was inherent in his philosophy, while defenders framed it merely as professional opportunism.) They only crossed paths once more, a decade and a half later, when Marcuse visited his old mentor’s mountain cottage in the Black Forest and extracted a weak admission that joining the Nazi Party had been a “political error”. Yet, as Feenberg shows, Marcuse never abandoned this phenomenological inheritance. He downplayed his debt to Heideggerianism, but it continued to animate his thinking as his fame and influence increased over the following decades.
Feenberg makes this case through a close reading of Marcuse’s essay “The Foundation of Historical Materialism”, written the same year he left Germany. This was the first comprehensive review of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts following their belated discovery and publication. Its implicit argument is that the combined insights of Marx and Heidegger amount to an ontological indictment of capitalism: an analysis of the system which presents it as a negation of humanity itself.
Marx starts from the premise that our relationship to nature is defined by need and dependency. But what distinguishes us from other animals is our creative capacity to transform our environment – and invest it with cultural meaning – via the activity of labor. Through this process, which he calls “objectification”, human faculties are imprinted on the artifacts we produce. The subject recognizes himself in the object and is thereby reconciled with it. In pre-socialist society, however, the worker’s separation from the means of production precludes such reconciliation. Labour is estranged, circumscribed by the dictates of capital, and man no longer sees himself in his creations. Revolution therefore becomes necessary to supplant alienation with authenticity.
In this sense, capitalism can be said to contradict a fundamental human “essence”. For Feenberg, it was Marcuse’s steadfast belief in this essence – which would unite “the individual with society, human beings with nature, and subject with object” – that made him the most radical Frankfurt School philosopher: the only one to develop a genuinely revolutionary theory. Yet Marcuse was diverted from this task for much of the 1930s and 1940s: first by the Frankfurt institute’s ambitious research program, then by the Second World War and its aftermath.
Upon moving to New York in 1934 he wrote numerous essays for the institute on methods of cultural critique and the intellectual situation in Nazi Germany. Following the outbreak of war, the institute was beset by financial difficulties, and he uprooted once again to Washington DC, where he was hired by the newly established intelligence agencies, whose aim was to understand the German political climate. Marcuse was an unlikely servant of the deep state. Asked to produce a report on German Stimmung (or “morale”), he undertook a satirical “class analysis” of the term, tracking its various iterations across the country’s social hierarchy – much to the bemusement of his colleagues. Although he grew increasingly uncomfortable in the role during the early years of the Truman administration, he stayed put until 1951, conducting impressive if largely ineffectual research on postwar European politics, and attempting to resist the rising tide of anti-communism.
Marcuse returned to his investigation of human ontology with Eros and Civilisation (1955), which marked the first real diffusion of his ideas into the wider culture. To understand the creative force that Marx had identified in the 1844 Manuscripts – the capacity to reshape the external world – he looked to the Freudian drives. The pursuit of the pleasure principle, he claimed, is what defines fulfilling labor and gives meaning to our life-world: “Eros transforms being.” By extension, the criteria for a just society are aesthetic: how much sensuous satisfaction can we derive from our environment? Does it meet the standards of beauty? In this schema, which proposes an erotic unity of man and nature, socialism is modeled not on the blueprints of economic planners but on the work of art. The utopian future would turn artistic labor – whereby creators objectify and recognize themselves in their work – into labor tout court.
[See also: Why Marx is more relevant than ever in the age of automation]
Eros and Civilisation reinterpreted Freud to argue that such a social order based on the pleasure principle was feasible, despite the assumption of traditional psychoanalysis that the emancipated libido would shatter social cohesion. The task, for Marcuse, was to defend the open possibilities of erotic experience against the closed and repressive society taking shape in the United States. Yet his next major work outlined the difficulty of that endeavor amid the bureaucratized culture of the early 1960s. One-Dimensional Man (1964) diagnosed consumer capitalism as a warped, oppressive realization of this erotic dream: its degeneration into a nightmare.
Mass production and welfare provision met the needs of the population, and even heightened their pleasures, within a system that impeded liberation. Eros had been released, only to be absorbed and neutralized. “The range of socially permissible and desirable satisfaction is greatly enlarged,” he wrote, “but through this satisfaction, the pleasure principle is reduced – deprived of the claims which are irreconcilable with the established society. Pleasure, thus adjusted, generates submission.”
Of course, no sooner had Marcuse made this bleak assessment (which RD Laing described as “the sad and bitter song of an ageing scholar from old Germany in the New World”) than it was belied by the upheavals of 1968. When the protests broke out, Marcuse was attending a Unesco conference in Paris, accompanied by Feenberg. Unaware that a media campaign had already cast him as the “idol” of the movement, he soon found himself mobbed by hordes of journalists and disciples. Street marchers began to unfurl banners bearing the slogan “Marx, Mao, Marcuse!”. He traveled the continent giving improvised speeches to packed lecture halls, praising the “new sensibility” of the students – a spirit of liberation had smashed through the one-dimensional condition – yet warning against the kind of revolutionary overreach he had witnessed in Germany 50 years earlier.
His stardom elicited a ferocious backlash from the right. Pope Paul VI accused him of popularising an “anarchistic and nihilistic delusion”. He received death threats, along with ominous letters from the Ku Klux Klan and Minutemen. His graduate students decided to stand guard at his house throughout the night and asked a non-student friend to sit in on his lectures with a gun, “just in case”. He was ultimately forced out of his job at the University of California in order to appease Governor Ronald Reagan, who claimed he was unfit to teach.
Marcuse’s reception in some quarters of the left was also scathing. The Soviet newspaper Pravda denounced him as a “false prophet”. The American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya argued that by assuming “the new forms of control have indeed succeeded in containing workers’ revolt”, he had accepted the illusory self-image of bourgeois society. And the Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn castigated him for retreating from the scientific analysis of late capitalism – its concrete fissures, forces, contradictions – into a naive “metaphysical humanism”. Marcuse, though, was disinclined to reply to his critics. He spent his final years criss-crossing the Atlantic: attending conferences, praising the emergent forms of feminism and ecologism, and tirelessly supporting the work of activists, until his death in 1979.
How do such appraisals hold up when evaluating his oeuvre today? For a philosopher concerned with the future, Marcuse was uniquely bad at predicting it. As late as 1939 he was confident there would be no war in Europe; he was blindsided by the student movement with which he became associated; and his description of the industrial welfare state as an unassailable fortress failed to anticipate its ruination under neoliberalism. The reasons for his poor foresight were summarised by Therborn. Rather than attempting a “positive identification of the structures of the capitalist social formation, or of the forces within it capable of transforming that social formation”, Marcuse merely juxtaposed the essence of man to the essence of advanced capitalism.
To Marcuse’s detractors, this was the mistake that Hegel made and Marx corrected: seeing history as a series of abstractions rather than a complex totality. It left Marcuse unable to account for fractures within the ruling class or possible points of resistance. Indeed, from the 1980s onward, the one-dimensionality thesis seemed embarrassingly dated. Far from sating desires and expanding satisfactions, the financialised state had abandoned significant parts of its population to poverty. The production of what Marcuse called “false needs” was supplanted by an austerity regime indifferent to needs of any kind – generating an array of populist reactions from the proletarian classes whom he had summarily written off.
However, when considering Marcuse’s 21st-century relevance, the present conjuncture may not be as straightforward as the neoliberal zenith. The dogma of laissez-faire remains strong, but it faces two primary challengers: to its left, a more progressive state interventionism that aims to mitigate climate change, increase welfare provision and improve employment prospects; to its right, a poisonous nativism that pledges to protect the homeland and the nuclear family from the leveling effects of unchecked markets. The US party-political landscape is now defined by these contrasting visions, manifest in the clash between Bidenism and Trumpism. Both can be understood, in Marcuse’s terms, as an attempt to reassimilate the social groups whose libidinal investment in capitalism has been severed. If Eros is repressed under the status quo, the system’s competing successors hope to release it once again, either by exhuming social democracy or indulging the most violent forms of pleasure-seeking, or some mixture of the two.
The left, having seen its prospects fade over the past 40 years, is naturally tempted to embrace one of these alternatives. Some of its partisans have aligned themselves with the supposedly conservative cultural values of the white working class. Others have welcomed Bidenism with open arms, foregoing the horizon of socialism and satisfying themselves with social democracy. Reading Marcuse in 2023 is perhaps the best antidote to these twin poles of capitulation.
His theory of the human essence provides a critical standard by which to judge both types of post-neoliberal politics – neither of which offers a solution to alienation, nor a genuine fulfilment of the pleasure principle. It shows up the gulf between an authentic existence, based on a creative relationship with the outside world, and a condition in which that world appears strange and hostile, because it is owned and dominated by elites. Contra Therborn, there is nothing metaphysical about this concept of the essence. It emerges from lived subjective experience: the realm carefully parsed by phenomenology.
Here, Feenberg’s example of climate policy is apposite. The vogue for incentivising green capital, represented by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, will surely help to curb emissions. But to achieve the Marcusean reconciliation of subject and object, something drastically different is needed: not the empowerment of environmentally conscious investors, but the reorientation of our economic and political structures towards participatory ecological planning. Aesthetic harmony with nature demands more than tax breaks for Tesla.
If this scale of change sounds unlikely, that is perhaps another reason for Marcuse’s timeliness. His philosophy, much like our era, is characterised by the absence of revolutionary agents. Despite his strident support for the ideals of the student revolt, he emphasized that the First World was a long way from actualizing them thanks to its sophisticated means of containing dissent: “Everything can be co-opted, everything can be digested.” This was partly what gave his prose its distinctive, bittersweet cadence: he could identify the fragments of a better future that existed within the present, without overstating their ability to transform it. His critics were correct that his utopian imaginary often overshot his immediate circumstances, which he sketched somewhat impressionistically, without the rigour of a scientific socialist. He therefore struggled to pinpoint the trends and actors that could bring about a historical rupture. But Marcuse’s theory of man nonetheless exposed a chasm between the real and the possible. His contemporary legatees must keep it open. ...Read More
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CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
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History Lesson of the Week:
This Native American Tribe Is Taking Back Its Water
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With a new state-of-the-art irrigation project, Arizona’s Pima Indians are transforming their land into what it once was: the granary of the Southwest
Wesley Miles, a Pima archaeologist, points out that the placement of this new canal parallel to a prehistoric channel “says something about our ancestors’ engineering skills.” Tomás Karmelo Amaya
By Jim Robbins
Smithsonian
Cradling her 4-year-old son, Cowboy, Camille Cabello watches tumbleweeds blow across an emerald green field of newly sprouted alfalfa toward a small canal. Water spills over the canal’s side, glistening in the brilliant Arizona sun.
Not far away, her husband, Cimarron, his head covered in a western hat, guards the stream with a pitchfork. As the tumbleweeds roll into the water, he fishes them out. “On a windy day like this we have to stay out here,” Camille says, a dust devil spiraling skyward in the distance behind her. “If we don’t get them out of there it will clog the canal and cause problems.”
Cabellos
The Cabello family guards a channel on their plot with a pitchfork, lest tumbleweeds clog the canal. They’re among dozens of new growers in the last 15 years. Tomás Karmelo Amaya
This desert tableau is at once modern and ancient. Modern because the arrow-straight canal, lined with concrete and designed with turnouts that divert water to flood the field, is the last leg of a state-of-the-art irrigation system here on the Gila River Indian Community, an Indian reservation in southern Arizona. Ancient because Camille is a member of the Akimel O’odham, or River People, also called Pima. For centuries her ancestors practiced irrigated agriculture across this vast desert, digging hundreds of miles of canals that routed water from the Gila and Salt rivers onto planted fields of maize, beans and squash, the “three sisters” that fed a huge swath of prehistoric America.
The sprawling civilization of the canal-building Huhugam—the Pima name for their ancestors, meaning “our people who have come before”—reached its pinnacle in the 15th century. Exactly what happened to it after that, however, is a mystery. Some evidence points to a protracted drought; other data, from the study of geological layers, suggests a series of massive floods destroyed large sections of the canal network. Pima oral tradition holds that a class rebellion overthrew the society’s elite. Whatever the reason, Huhugam culture experienced a precipitous decline, and desert winds eventually covered over their canals with sand, dirt and weeds. Gone, too, were their monumental four-story buildings, ball courts and villages, buried by the very desert soil that once sustained them. ...Read More
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These titles will be released in 2022, but you can order them from Hard Ball Press just in time for the holidays!
Powerful stories, wonderful gifts.
As they stand up, slow down, form unions, leave an abusive relationship or just stir up good trouble, the characters in this multi-generation novel entertain and enlighten, make us laugh and rage, and encourage us to love deeply, that we may continue the fight for justice.
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“What a wonderful story of class, class struggle and regular people. The story is about struggle and change, but also about joy and humor. Great work! ─ Bill Fletcher, Jr., author of Solidarity Divided
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Mexican Women: ‘Not One Femicide More!’
WEEKLY BULLETIN OF THE MEXICO SOLIDARITY PROJECT
from the March 15, 2023 Bulletin
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Pests vs. Pesticides — and Collateral Damages
Boston, a city where I once lived, hosts some 175 “community gardens,” tiny city- or nonprofit-owned plots where people from every part of the world can plant gardens. People of every nationality, these gardens show, love to put their hands in the dirt, and each nationality has its own horticultural secrets. All this gardening can be quite a sight. Kneeling side by side, people who can’t speak each other’s languages communicate excitedly through their plants, united through their love of the land.
And the land loves them back. Every summer, the carefully tended plots produce tastes of home ranging from beautiful and bountiful tomatoes to Thai basil and bitter melons. Every summer, the planters proudly introduce new flavors to their neighboring plot holders.
What a contrast to the corporate agribusiness all around us! In this week’s interview with researcher Jason Porter, we take a look at how the voracious drive for profit has fueled the growth of enormous factory farms in both the United States and México. In the process, farmworkers have become expendable widgets, their knowledge of the land tossed in the junk heap — and once healthy land no longer rates as arable. The arsenic that factory farms have so widely used turns out to be an element that does not degrade with time.
Yes, pesticides like arsenic do kill unwanted insects. But how much more do they end up costing us in collateral damages? Pesticides kill and endanger snakes and toads, natural species that feed on pests. Pesticides also subject farmworkers, predominantly Mexican and Black, to diseases and even death. Consumers suffer from pesticides as well. They can get sick from food grown on contaminated land. Indigenous cultures see our land as the source of all life, our mother. Pesticide poisons amount to matricide.
Community gardening and the rest of the global environmental justice movement help us understand that we can restore the health of our land — and the health of all living species. All of us make up a global food chain. If we share our traditional knowledge with other “plot holders,” we can unite through love of food and farming. ...Read More
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Our Amazing Resource for Radical Education
From the settlers to the present, and how its consciousness is conflicted. Prepared by Carl Davidson and Rebecca Tarlau,
with some help from the DSA Rust Belt group.
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There are hundreds of video courses here, along with study guides, downloadable books and links to hundreds of other resources for study groups or individuals.
Nearly 10,000 people have signed on to the OUL for daily update, and more than 150,000 have visited us at least once.
Karl Marx's ideas are a common touchstone for many people working for change. His historical materialism, his many contributions to political economy and class analysis, all continue to serve his core values--the self-emancipation of the working class and a vision of a classless society. There are naturally many trends in Marxism that have developed over the years, and new ones are on the rise today. All of them and others who want to see this project succeed are welcome here.
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Video for Learning: Richard Wolff on the Collapsing Banks --25 min
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Harry Targ's 'Diary of a Heartland Radical' |
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Tune of the Week: Johnny Cash 'When The Man Comes Around' ... 4.41 minutes
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Book Review: The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis
Verso, London, 2023. 256 pp., £17.99 pb
ISBN 97818042908355
Reviewed by Giannis Perperidis
https://marxandphilosophy.org
Giannis Perperidis is a PhD candidate at the Philosophy Department of the University of Ioannina, …
In his newly published book, The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing: Nature and Revolution in Marcuse’s Philosophy of Praxis, Andrew Feenberg attempts a theoretical exploration into the depths of the thought of his former teacher, Herbert Marcuse. The uniqueness of such an exploration is the fact that Feenberg presents every dimension of Marcuse’s thought.
Not only does he present and analyze Marcuse’s roots in phenomenology, as he has attempted elsewhere (Feenberg 2005), or his teacher’s appropriation of Marx and other Marxist theorists (Feenberg 2014), but moreover he attempts to present all aspects of Marcuse’s thought: his roots in Kantian and neo-Kantian thought and in Lebensphilosophie (i.e. Wilhelm Dilthey), his readings of Hegel and the ‘potentiality’ derived from Hegelian dialectics, his phenomenological appropriation of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, the influence of other Marxist thinkers like Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno and Benjamin, the influence of Heidegger in his thought, his understanding of the Freudian psychoanalysis and its utilisation for a politics of a different kind of society, his approach to science and technology, aesthetics, and of course his project for a different kind of reason within modernity. Feenberg does not offer yet another book on Marcuse and his critical theory, or a book focused in one aspect of his teacher’s philosophy. On the contrary, he provides a complete presentation of one of the most influential philosophers of late twentieth century.
In the beginning, Feenberg expresses his experience as a student of Marcuse. He sketches Marcuse’s personality while unfolding historical events that he remembers from the time Marcuse was almost unknown in the US until the time his teacher was portrayed as the ‘“idol” of the student revolt’ (3). While unfolding such events, Feenberg paints the canvas of the historical period with all of its political and theoretical challenges, the world within which Marcuse’s thought incubated.
After having set the historical context, Feenberg moves on to presenting the philosophical context of the period which influenced Marcuse’s insights. As he highlights: ‘Existentialism and phenomenology [on one hand and] Marxism [on the other] were the two dominant worldviews at the time’ (15). Marcuse was influenced by both of them and Feenberg attempts to develop his teacher’s appropriation of Marx’s theory based on his understanding of existentialism. But in order to achieve this, Feenberg needs to explain Marcuse’s philosophical point of view through which he approached Marx. This is a challenging presentation since Marcuse approached Marx through a specific philosophical lens rooted in neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. Debate over whether Marcuse is a Marxist or phenomenologist-Marxist is still open and Feenberg weighs in with the second interpretation by arguing that ‘[i]t is impossible to understand [Marcuse’s] thought without reference to the phenomenological background’ (17). What exactly is this phenomenological account and why is it so important for Marcuse’s reading of Marx?
A key notion for understanding Marcuse’s reading of Marx is Lebenswelt, introduced by Husserl in his phenomenological investigations. Here Marcuse finds the conflation between fact and value distinguished by modernity on account of its differentiating core. This is the reason why experience has such significance for Marcuse and for Feenberg: the values that mathematical rationality abandoned as mere subjective ideas return as concrete experience that inform rationality through the Lebenswelt. This everyday experience of the lifeworld derives from workers, citizens and people of a certain society. This is the point of reading Marx through a phenomenological perspective.
Moving deeper into the philosophy of Marcuse, Feenberg identifies a concrete and cogent philosophical basis: Hegel. The Frankfurt School’s Hegelianism is well-known and Marcuse couldn’t have escaped such an influence. Feenberg analyzes mostly Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, which focuses on Hegel’s philosophy, especially his conception of ‘real possibilities’, out of which Marcuse articulates a radical social critique. By criticizing the positivism of his period, Marcuse goes beyond empirical data to argue that not only is what is given to the senses real, but potential, hidden from the present, is also real and can be actualized.
For Hegel this actualization comes through the Aufhebung of logical contradictions towards a new ‘synthesis’ – for Marcuse, ‘the negation of the negation’ (78) – that rendered a new logical stage in the movement of spirit towards the absolute Idea. However for Marcuse, this Aufhebung is translated as social critique and the movement towards new stages is the overcoming of social contradictions and the actualization of social, political, economic and other potentials hidden within social phenomena. Such overcoming is possible due to the two-dimensional ontology Marcuse introduces in contradiction to one-dimensionality imposed by existing political and economic forces.
Within the two-dimensionality account, the role of experience is of great significance: the way people experience Lebenswelt procures a certain kind of rationality. For Marcuse one-dimensional rationality and experience need to be overcome and replaced with a different kind of experience and rational thinking. This new kind of rationality will be structured through a different sense of the world. Marcuse thinks of social change and the actualization of potential in this way: through a new kind of experience, hence a new kind of man (being). For Marcuse, as Feenberg continues, the foundations of such an anthropology were to be found at the heart of Freudian psychoanalysis.
‘The Politics of Eros’ is an insightful title to present Marcuse’s thoughts on psychoanalysis, which is employed as cogent support for his social and political theory. Again, the appropriation of Freudian psychoanalysis from the members of the initial circle of the Frankfurt School is well-known. But Feenberg’s analysis of Marcuse’s specific appropriation of it focuses on its political implications. Marcuse attempts to present the epistemological and political consequences of the redefinition of reason through imagination and beauty, meaning the redefinition of the Reaitätlprinzip (reality principle) through Lustprinzip (pleasure principle).
This redefinition would not suggest or lead to sexualizing the whole of reality, but would instead mean a different kind of rationality and bodily experience, without separating reality into distinct pieces or destroy nature, but enjoying every aspect of life, even work. It is clear that Marcuse thought he had dealt with the classic problem of ‘work vs free time’ through this kind of reappropriation of reality through the lens of a different kind of human being, a human being that has affection towards reality without approaching it like a cold and rational machine. This differentiation in human nature and the ability to grasp reality and acquire knowledge would be the ultimate political aim of Marcuse’s thought. As Feenberg puts it, Marcuse seems to connect the oppression of the psyche by constant repressions and sublimations (meaning the continuation of civilization, in Freud’s terms) with certain social phenomena of revolution: ‘Marcuse argued that Eros inspires movements around issues such as environmentalism and the rights of women and gender and racial minorities’ (129). Such insight renders Marcuse a true advocate of social transformation.
Despite being very interesting, the ideas expressed through psychoanalysis in Eros and Civilization give their place to a critique of rationality and technology on a different basis. This kind of critique is what interests Feenberg the most in the thought of his teacher. As Feenberg argues in many of his books, Marcuse provides cogent foundations for a social critique of technology (the one which Feenberg attempts to actualize in all of his works).
Thus for Feenberg, Marcuse grasped that capitalism does not use a neutral technology for its own aims. Rather, society itself is being articulated around a certain rationality – technical rationality – that is essentially capitalistic. That is what ‘one-dimensional society’ means (as is clearly expressed in One-Dimensional Man). As Feenberg puts it: ‘The problem is no longer the inability of capitalism to make effective use of the technologies it has developed, but rather the catastrophic human consequences of the effective use of these very technologies’ (141). One-dimensionality means that the thought and action of human beings no longer valorizes the radical hidden potential.
For Marcuse, as Feenberg underlines, this is due to the technical rationality that dominates not only the factory, but every dimension of human life, from the market to one’s own home and personal relations. This is why his project was to transform the very rationality of modernity. He criticizes what he calls ‘formal universals’, meaning the universalisation of the formal logic that identifies everything in the world by decontextualizing its qualities, leaving no place for hidden potentialities to emerge. If formal universals prevail within society, then the radical new that may cause a transformation of the social disappears.
For Marcuse, this kind of formal logic is incorporated in technical rationality which constructs our technical world. Thus our social world is mediated by this kind of logic transferred within technologies. This specific rationality culminates in one-dimensional man. For Marcuse, the opposite is the substantive universal which is based on the dialectical logic drawn from Hegel, combined with the project for a different rationality through psychoanalytic critique. ...Read More
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Film Review: ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’, the Latest Entry in Keanu Reeves Franchise Is Pure, Over-the-Top Action Spectacle
Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgard and Scott Adkins are among the newcomers for this new installment of the big-screen series about the hitman who just can't stay successfully retired.
By Frank Scheck
Hollywood Reporter
MARCH 13, 2023 - The creatives behind the John Wick franchise must lose sleep at night thinking how they can outdo themselves with each new installment. If so, it makes a strong case for insomnia, since John Wick: Chapter 4 outdoes its formidable predecessors in nearly every respect.
Bigger, badder, bolder, longer, and featuring nearly more spectacular set pieces than one movie can comfortably handle, this epic action film practically redefines the stakes. If at times it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the excessive mayhem is coming dangerously close to overkill, that seems suitable for a film series featuring body counts higher than some wars.
THE BOTTOM LINE
As the title character says: "Yeah!"
Release date: Friday, March 24
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgard, Laurence Fishburne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shamier Anderson, Lance Reddick, Rina Sawayama, Scott Adkins, Clancy Brown, Ian McShane, Marko Zaror, Natalia Tena
Director: Chad Stahelski
Screenwriters: Shay Hatten, Michael Finch
Rated R, 2 hours 49 minutes
“The bloodshed in Osaka was not necessary,” one character observes after a typically violent melee in a luxury hotel that leaves scores dead and the premises practically in ruins. “The bloodshed was the point,” says another. And so it is with this hugely successful series featuring Keanu Reeves as the former hitman who thought he was out, only to be pulled back in, after his beloved puppy was killed in the first film. The bloodshed is the point — or, more accurately, the amazingly choreographed and photographed action sequences that make particular use of the combination of martial arts and gunplay battling known as “gun-fu.” This edition ups the ante further, with an impressively executed car chase/gun battle through the streets of Paris — including around the Arc de Triomphe — that brings “car-fu” into the violent mix.
Things aren’t going too well for the titular character as the film begins, which for him is not unusual. The High Table, that international criminal organization that seems to run the world, is out for his blood. To that end, their representative, the Marquis (Bill Skarsgard, enjoyably playing a character only slightly less villainous than his Pennywise), puts a huge bounty on his head, attracting such freelance operatives as the Tracker (Shamier Anderson), who doesn’t go anywhere without his loyal, and very lethal, Belgian Malinois. The Marquis also hires the blind but no less dangerous Caine (Hong Kong superstar Donnie Yen), a former friend of Wick’s who only accepts the assignment because the High Table will kill his daughter if he doesn’t.
Things aren’t going so well for Wick’s friends, either. Early in the proceedings, the High Table’s emissary, known as the Harbinger (Clancy Brown), shows up at the New York Continental Hotel, that comfortable downtown haven for assassins, and informs its owner Winston (Ian McShane, more delightfully droll than ever) and his faithful concierge (Lance Reddick) that the hotel will be demolished in one hour.
Newcomers to the series would do well to do some research beforehand, because as the above summary indicates, mythology is a strong element. It could be argued that, like so many franchises dealing with fantasy worlds, the creators have gotten carried away with their convoluted constructs. I won’t make that argument, since I consider the elaborate world the John Wick films have created, which looks so much like ours, to be one of its most delicious elements. But you couldn’t blame repeat viewers watching the film later on via streaming for fast-forwarding through the talky parts to get to the action.
To recount the highlights of those elaborately staged set pieces would take up too much space, because there are so damn many of them. (Fourteen in all, according to the filmmakers. I can’t vouch for accuracy, since I lost count.) Besides the aforementioned car chase and hotel battle featuring guns, swords, bows and arrows, and a large variety of improvised weapons (a Wick specialty), there’s an amazing fight scene set in a water-drenched, multi-level nightclub featuring hundreds of revelers who barely notice the face-off between Wick and the gold-toothed Killa. The latter is played by action movie star and former MMA fighter Scott Adkins, amusingly outfitted with prosthetics and a huge bodysuit that somehow doesn’t hamper his fighting skills.
Then the there’s the gun battle between Wick and hordes of deadly minions in a warren of rooms in an apartment building, filmed from high overhead with a floating camera that follows the continuous action as if it were observing a particularly violent ant colony. And another fight sequence that takes place on a massively steep staircase leading up to Sacré Coeur that is so ridiculously over-the-top — including Wick’s repeatedly falling down the length of them only to get back up and start all over again, like a black-suit-wearing Wile E. Coyote — that it elicited rapturous giggles from the audience at the press screening. ...Read More
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