September 2023

Committees of Correspondence Socialist Education Project

4^th Monday Webinar Series

September 25, 9 pm (eastern time, 6 pm pacific time)

 “New Realities in International Relations: the Ukraine War, BRICS, the Sahel, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and the Global South”

The CCDS Peace and Solidarity Committee has established a new group to study and propose activities concerning the rapid transformations of international relations today. These include a reconfiguration of global power from the US-dominated system set up after World War II to a new inclusive, multilateral, and multipolar world.

Examples of the reconfiguration of global power from the traditional “great powers” to coalitions of nations from the Global South include renewed calls for a New International Economic Order, the rise of the BRICS, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and so-called “dedollarization.”

A panel of activists will address these issues; what they mean, their significance, and what the consequences are for the Peace and Solidarity movement. Short presentations will be followed by discussion.

Please register for this important discussion.

 https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMlcu-uqj8vGtBvc7oaZpkAt5TYr7SrUSa

Register in advance for this meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMlcu-uqj8vGtBvc7oaZpkAt5TYr7SrUSaj 

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Friday, September 8, 2023

The United States Overthrows Allende

But The Global South Continues to Organize

Harry Targ

The Allende Years and the US Coup

The election of Socialist Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 became the target of sustained interest of the Nixon Administration. The United States had supported the Christian Democrats in Chile with official assistance and CIA financing since the 1950s. Eduardo Frei, Chile's president from 1964 to 1970, had been its favorite Chilean politician. Frei had been opposed in presidential elections by the Marxist Allende, who, leading a left coalition, finally won a plurality of votes in 1970, despite much CIA money funneled into the coffers of the Christian Democratic candidate. From the time of the election in October, 1970, until September, 1973, when a bloody military coup toppled Allende, the United States did everything it could to destabilize the elected government. From October to November, 1970, the United States pressured members of the Chilean parliament to vote against certification of the election victory, traditionally a routine exercise. After Allende had been confirmed as president, energy and resources were used to damage the economy and make contact with right-wing members of the Chilean military to plan a coup.

Allende carried out many policies designed to improve the material conditions of the lives of the workers and peasants in Chile. Land was redistributed, major industries were nationalized (copper had been partially nationalized under Frei), and  diplomatic relations were established with the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. All these moves exacerbated tensions with the United States, since investments in copper, iron, nitrates, iodine, and salt were large.

The Nixon administration formed a secret committee, headed by Kissinger and enthusiastically endorsed by the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, a major economic power in Chile, whose purpose was the overthrow of Allende. The committee's preference was for an Allende defeat resulting from public rejection, but, if all else failed, a military coup was preferable to a continuation of his government. Among the policies utilized by Washington were an informal economic blockade of Chile, termination of aid and loans, IMF pressure on the government to carry out antiworker policies, fomenting dissent in the military, and funding opposition groups and newspapers, like the influential newspaper El Mercurio.

Allende's economic policies were effective and generated much support from workers and peasants during 1970 and 1971; but, after the economic squeeze on the government increased, Allende had to grapple with inflation, balance-of-payments problems, and the inability to get spare parts and capital goods that had traditionally come from the United States. In trying to forestall military intervention in the political process, Allende allowed the "constitutionalist" officers to be replaced by avowed fascist generals. U.S. contacts with these generals provided the organizational basis for the impending coup. Excessive demands by more well paid workers and more secure peasants, coupled with a truckers' strike and demonstrations of middle-class housewives organized by the rightwing, added to the problems of the Allende government in 1972 and 1973. Despite the increasing economic and political problems being faced by Allende and the systematic efforts by the U.S. government to create discord within Chile, the Allende-led left coalition scored electoral victories in municipal elections throughout the country in March, 1973.

Since "making the economy scream" had not led to the rejection of Allende at the ballot box, the Kissinger committee and the right-wing generals decided to act. On September I l, 1973, the military carried out a coup that ousted the Allende government, and Allende himself was assassinated in the presidential palace. A junta headed by General Pinochet began a policy of extermination, torture, and imprisonment on a massive scale. A year after the coup, Amnesty International reported that some 6,000 to 10,000 prisoners had been taken. The new regime also banned all political parties, abolished trade unions, and continued its political repression both at home and abroad. In reference to the latter, Orlando Letelier, foreign minister in the Allende government, was blown up in a car in Washington, D.C., by Pinochet agents.

The spirit of the brutal U.S. policy in Chile was expressed by Kissinger in 1970: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people" (James A. Nathan and James K. Oliver, United States Foreign Policy and World Order, Little, Brown, 1981, p.496) and by President Ford in his first press conference, defending the coup as being in the "best interests of the people of Chile and certainly in the best interests of the United States" (Nathan and Oliver, p. 497). A somewhat more accurate assessment was made by historian Alexander De Conde, who wrote that the United States “had a hand in the destruction of a moderate left-wing government that allowed democratic freedoms to its people and to its replacement by a friendly right-wing government that crushed such freedoms with torture and other police-state repressions" (Alexander DeConde, A History of American Foreign Policy, Volume ll Charles Scribner, 1978, pp.388-389).

The Third World Demands a New International Economic Order

The brutal overthrow of the Allende government in Chile was reminiscent of traditional US. activities as world policeman. The impact of the coup on the Chilean people in terms of economic justice and political freedom was negative in the extreme. The bloody victory of counterrevolution in Chile, however, came at a period in world history when the rise of Third World resistance to U.S. imperialism would reduce the prospect of more Chiles in the future.

By the 1970s, the worldwide resistance to U.S. and international capitalism was growing. The revolutionary manifestation of this resistance was occurring in Southeast Asia, southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and Central America and the Caribbean. During the Nixon-Ford period, the United States and its imperialist allies lost control of the Indochinese states, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. South Yemen, Nicaragua, Iran, and Grenada would follow later in the decade.

Along with the rise of revolutionary victories and movements throughout the Third World, a worldwide reformist movement began to take shape around demands for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). Its predecessor, the. nonaligned movement of the 1950s and 1960s, had been nurtured by leading anticolonial figures such as Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah of Ghana, and Nehru of India. Their goal was to construct a bloc of Third World nations of all ideological hues which could achieve political power and economic advantage by avoiding alliances and political stances that might tie them to the United States or the Soviet Union. The nonaligned movement saw the interests of member nations tied to the resolution of "north-south" issues, which in their view were of greater importance than "east-west" issues.

After two decades of experience with political independence from formal colonialism, revolutionaries who believed that economic exploitation resulted from the structure of the international capitalist system were joined by Third World leaders who saw the need to reform international capitalism. Consequently, a movement emerged, largely within UN agencies, increasingly populated by Third World nations and addressing itself to Third World poverty and underdevelopment. This movement presupposed the possibility of reducing the suffering of Third World peoples without necessarily bringing an end to capitalism as the internationally dominant mode of production.

To counter the declining Third World percentage of world trade, fluctuations in prices of exported commodities, foreign corporate repatriation of profits earned in Third World countries, technological dependence, growing international debt, and deepening crises in the supply of food, Third World leaders were forced by material conditions and revolutionary ferment to call for reforms. The inspiration for a NIEO movement came also from the seeming success of OPEC countries in gaining control of oil pricing and production decisions from foreign corporations.

Two special sessions of the General Assembly of the UN in 1974 and 1975 on the NIEO "established the concept as a priority item of the international community" (Ervin Laszlo, Robert Baker Jr., Elliott Eisenberg, Raman Venkata, The Objectives of the New International Economic Order, New York, Pergamon, 1978, pp. xvi). The NEIO became a short-hand reference for a series of interrelated economic and political demands concerning issues that required fundamental policy changes, particularly from wealthy nations. The issue areas singled out for action included aid and assistance, international trade and finance, industrialization, technology transfer, and business practices.

Paradoxically, while the NIEO demands were reformist in character and, if acted on, could stave off revolutionary ferment (as did New Deal legislation in the United States in the 1930s), the general position of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations on the NIEO were negative. European nations were more responsive to selected demands, like stabilizing Third World commodity prices and imports into Common Market countries, but the broad package of NIEO demands continued to generate resistance from the wealthy nations, which benefited from the current system. Nabudere correctly understands the interests of Third World leaders in the NIEO when he wrote that:

“The demands of the petty bourgeoisie of third world countries are not against exploitation of the producing classes in their countries, but of the domination of their class by monopoly. The demands therefore for reform—for more credit to enable the petty bourgeois more room also to exploit their own labor and extract a greater share of the surplus value. This is unachievable, for to do so is to negate monopoly—which is an impossible task outside the class struggle” (Wadada D. Nabudere, Essays on the Theory and Practice of Imperialism, London: Onyx Press, 1979, p.179).

Therefore, the NEIO, commodity cartels like OPEC, and other schemes for marginal redistribution of the profits derived from the international economy would not have gone beyond increasing the shares which Third World ruling classes received from the ongoing economic system. Minimal benefits to workers and peasants would accrue. Third World successes against monopoly capital, however, served to weaken the hold the latter has on the international system. 

Also, while channeling Third World militancy in a reformist direction, the NIEO and OPEC had the opposite effect of generating a new militancy among masses of Third World peoples where it did not exist before. Those workers, peasants, and intellectuals who gained consciousness of their plight in global structural terms through their leaders' UN activities came to realize that NIEO demands were not enough. They would come to realize what Nabudere argued, namely that:

“in order to succeed, the struggles cannot be relegated to demands for change at international bodies, mere verbal protests and parliamentary debates, etc. Therefore demands for a new economic order are made increasingly impossible unless framed in the general context of a new democratic revolution; the role of the working class and its allies is crucial to the achievement, in any meaningful way, of a new international economic order” (180).

Conclusion

In a period of less than twenty-five years, the United States had solidified a worldwide military alliance system, stimulated integrated economic institutions based on monopoly capitalism, started the most dangerous arms race in world history, and engaged in repeated acts of military, political, and economic intervention in nations throughout the world. Similarly, labor militancy was crushed at home. The U.S. public was mobilized by rhetoric about "fighting communism," "liberating" Eastern Europe, constructing a "new frontier," aiding in economic development, stopping "wars of national liberation," and 'building peace with honor. "

Paradoxically, in this same period many political forces were emerging to challenge the economic, military, and political hegemony of the United States. Intervention in Chile admittedly fit the pattern established in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s. Between Iran and Chile, however, the United States had lost a major war to the Vietnamese people and was unable to forestall Marxist victories in southern Africa. Even reform minded Third World ruling classes were making demands on the United States and its allies that impinged on the free workings of world capitalism.

Medicare for All Update Group Zoom

Wednesday September 20th  5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern

Topic: How will the fight for a just health care system impact the 2024 Election?

All are welcome - if you wish to attend, email: [email protected] and you will get the Zoom link 

To: CCDS

Dear Editor:

You asked for comments. The LeftLinks editorial of July 28 wrote:

“To press on, they (some on the Left who want to curb arms to Ukraine) have to make common cause with the pro-Putin far right. 

“we still see the principle contradiction as that between Russian aggression and Ukraine's fight for self-determination. Thus solidarity with Ukraine is our core responsibility, however nuanced we might be on secondary matters.”

I beg to differ. To negotiate peace with an alleged enemy is not making common cause unless the common cause is peace. Escalating arms makes common cause with more war, not peace. Those who support US imperialist arms are making common cause with the US Military-Industrial-congressional-Intel-media-academic-complex (“MICIMAC “coined by Ray McGovern.) 

The principle contradiction is not between Ukraine and Russia or even the US and Russia, but between nuclear war and nuclear disarmament. That is what threatens all of humanity, which is way more important than an isolated border war with ethnic antagonisms. This is not a “secondary matter.” Escalating the war in Ukraine tempts nuclear end times. The mere possession of nuclear weapons is a violation of the UN Charter. The declaration of Donbass and Crimea residents for autonomy or succession is allowed by the UN Charter.

Ukraine’s claim for self-determination is dwarfed by the violation of the sovereignty of 41 nations (a third of humanity) by US sanctions which has cost the lives of a hundred times more than the lives lost in Ukraine. Such sanctions are a violation of the UN Charter. Opposing three million slow and agonizing deaths from the lack of food and medicine takes precedence over arming another US endless proxy war. Also, attacks on Crimea destroyed the grain export deal.

Rather than waste our time and resources supporting US imperialism, we should put our efforts into nuclear disarmament and ending sanctions. That is our core responsibility, not solidarity with Ukraine’s suppression of a minority.

Richard Ochs, Baltimore MD

China: peoples congress, expanding economy, world stage

SEP's Fourth Monday in April

Friday, February 3, 2023

Essays in the Transformation of Higher Education: Dan Morris and Harry Targ

  From Upton Sinclair's 'Goose Step' to the Neoliberal University (lulu.com)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Macro and Micro Analyses of Higher Education

Chapter Two: Discourses On Ideology

Chapter Three: Branding

Chapter Four: What Do Universities Do?

Chapter Five: Universities and War:

Conclusion

Appendix

Introduction

In the following pages, you are going to find a lot of specific information about what is happening at one major public research university, but we believe what is happening at Purdue is analogous to a canary in a coal mine.  We believe that Purdue under Mitch Daniels, a former George Walker Bush administrator and Governor of Indiana, is becoming a high profile and influential spokesperson for the transformation of public higher education in the 21^st century in directions that we find dangerous and that go against how we value higher education.  We realize that, while we address extensively institutional changes and policies at Purdue, Indiana’s Land Grant University, our interest is in using this case study to illustrate larger patterns and issues that should be of concern to readers who care about the future of higher education in a broader sense.

Harry Targ's pieces do tend towards a wider-angle perspective than do those by Dan Morris, although both of us rely on our "boots on the ground" level understanding of Purdue to counteract and contest official media versions of what is happening at Purdue. We write at a moment when there is something of a "media desert" in terms of local news coverage of higher education in small markets such as Lafayette, Indiana. We have both tried to work to rectify the "media desert" landscape in our community by contributing to the Lafayette Independent,  an electronic newsletter.  We appreciate efforts by local journalists such as Dave Bangert and the student staff of the Purdue Exponent to offer coverage of the university in ways that are more substantial, and, often, more critical, than what one finds in the area's only mainstream newspaper, the Journal and Courier, and main local TV news source, and the Purdue NPR radio station, whose ownership in the last year has been mysteriously transferred to an Indianapolis corporation. Paradoxically the richest data for many of the essays below come from the official daily public relations newsletter from Purdue called   Purdue Today.  This public relations source celebrates Purdue’s latest connections with multinational corporations, the military, and state politics, and provides links to editorials published by Purdue’s President and other officials in the national press. Ironically, oftentimes what Purdue celebrates becomes the data for our more analytical and discursive writings.

Like alternative media sources, we see this book as another intervention in offering an alternative view of what is happening at our campus, but we also write with the hope that readers can apply the readings we bring to Purdue to begin conversations  about the promise and problems of contemporary higher education on campuses. The authors wish to praise and encourage further research and activism around the transformations of higher education in general. We identify with what some scholars have referred to as Critical University Studies (CUS). The essays below, we believe, are part of this emerging tradition of critical and self-reflective scholarship.

The authors also wish to identify at least three major elements of the transformation of higher education. First, Purdue, like many other universities, is once again pursuing research contracts with huge corporations, and perhaps most importantly, the Department of Defense. As essays below suggest, Purdue research is increasingly justified as serving the interests of United States “national security.” Often this is conceptualized as helping the United States respond to “the Chinese threat,” rarely identifying what exactly is the threat, or considering the possibility that contributing to a new arms race with a perceived adversary may increase, rather than reduce, the possibility for conflict between nations.

Second, the work below and other writings in CUS, highlight the purposive transformation of the content of higher education. Universities are moving resources away from the liberal arts, creating new programs in “artificial intelligence” and “data science,” and in response to political pressures are diminishing programs that emphasize interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and the structural problems of race, class, gender, and sexual preference in history and contemporary society. Essays below on “civics literacy” suggest that leading administrators at Purdue, while refusing to defend its universally praised Writing Lab after it was ridiculed on Fox News for its recommendation that student writers select gender-neutral terms such as postal worker when writing about occupations, seek to avoid the controversaries around Critical Race Theory by requiring all students to study in some fashion “civics literacy.” President Daniels has made it clear that the study of civics literacy will illustrate the “vitality” of US political institutions (as opposed to over-emphasizing the slaughter of the original inhabitants of the North American continent or the history of slavery and white supremacy).

Third, the essays below do not dwell enough on the transformation of the university as a workplace. While there have been attacks for years on the tenure system, a system of job security which was initially designed to protect faculty from external political pressures, recent additions to the transformations of the university as a work site should be noted.

Adjunctification is a term that refers to the qualitative increase in the hiring of various forms of part time instructors:  full-time instructors for a set time period,  instructors to teach less than a full complement of courses, and instructors with various arrangements that limit their work life, their ability to do research and prepare for their class time, and their time to serve the many needs of students. The fundamental trend in higher education is to “cheapen” and make insecure instructors, ultimately to destroy the job security that comes with academic tenure. In many cases this impacts negatively on the quality of the educational experience. (In colleges and universities in general about 70 percent of classes now are taught by instructors who are not tenure-line faculty).

And finally, every effort is made by universities to limit and derail the workplace concerns of non-teaching staff, particularly opposing their right to form unions.

One positive development from all of this-destroying the tenure system and job security, adjunctification, increased exploitation of graduate students, and finally restricting the rights and the wages and benefits of staff has been the rise of labor militancy. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and various unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the United Electrical Workers (UE) with a history of militancy have been organizing graduate students and staff.



Finally, the authors acknowledge that in the months after we completed our manuscript, Purdue administrators and trustees have announced a series of initiatives without an appropriate level of input from university stakeholders and the wider Lafayette area community:

1. Purdue is building a housing complex near the Discovery Park part of campus to attract higher income earning technologists to relocate in West Lafayette. To encourage new high-income residents, the West Lafayette city government has authorized $5,000 cash incentives for any purchasers of these new housing units adjacent to Purdue. Such offers are not available to lower income earners or students.

2. To deal with record enrollments, Purdue has purchased a privately constructed apartment complex across from campus at a price well more than the cost of its construction.

3. Purdue officials have expanded partnerships with Saab, Rolls Royce, the Raytheon Corporation, one of the world’s five largest military contractors, and undertaken a controversial business mission with the Indiana governor to Taiwan to pursue research and production of semi-conductors, in part to respond to what Purdue officials have described as a ”Chinese threat” to national security in the United States.

4.The College of Liberal Arts has announced it will be partnering with the College of Science to develop a new interdisciplinary degree program  in artificial intelligence. CLA calls its “new field” of interest, “sociogenomics.”

5. Purdue received an award recognizing its “excellence in counterintelligence,” one of only four such award recipients in 2022. Purdue joins those few universities which protect “sensitive national information from foreign adversaries.” The award announced in Purdue Today, August 24, 2022, noted that the university continues to work with the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) and the FBI.

In short, the transformation of Indiana’s Land Grant university continues at a rapid pace. And while the essays below concentrate on the developments and forces leading to these changes, the broader point of this collection of essays is to suggest that higher education in the twenty-first century is changing in a rapid and largely deleterious way. The appended essay by Carl Davidson reflects a similar critique of the university during the height of the Cold War. What we are witnessing today is a revitalization of that trend.

For those who value the university as a site for informing students about the world and debating the value of changes occurring in it, the developments highlighted in these essays are a warning. And for faculty and students alike the antidote to the militarization of the university, the transformation of the curricula, and the disempowering of those who work in universities is organizing against those elements of change that are antithetical to the educational process.

Two Americas on Contested Terrain

Reconstructing a Rainbow Democracy Vs.

Redeeming a White Supremacist Nationalism

Go here for the website:

(https://history-and-strategy.org)

The YouTube presentation by Carl Davidson and the discussion is linked below.

YouTube Recording

on Facebook HERE

 fed4mr.org

Order yours today

Vijay Prashad, “The Rise of ‘The Darker Nations’ in the 21^st Century:

Responses to Crises of War, Poverty,

and Environmental Disaster

click here for the recording