Freedom Rider: Talking About Mandela

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Nelson Mandela belongs to history now. We should be able to look at his whole life, his whole record in perspective. That perspective ought to include who is praising Nelson Mandela nowadays and why.

Nelson Mandela’s passing provides an important and rare opportunity for discussion of some very serious issues. We should not fear principled critique of people we admire but instead we have been treated to maudlin self-indulgence, useless idol worship and wrongheaded defense of Mandela’s memory.

Everyone looms large in death, and it is especially difficult to be truthful when a person of Mandela’s stature passes away. South Africa’s apartheid system was an international pariah, reviled by most of humanity and Mandela was the icon who it was hoped would bring it down forever.

Black Americans saw themselves in images of Sharpeville and Soweto. Mandela stood in for our assassinated leaders, political prisoners and victims of COINTELPRO. The South African struggle became our struggle and our chance to achieve what we were denied here at home. Of course Mandela’s release from 27 years of imprisonment brought near universal joy but it should have also raised more questions.

Mandela was one of the signatories of the Freedom Charter [5], which among other things demanded the nationalization of South Africa’s resources and reparations for the theft of African land by the Europeans. He was a member of the South African Communist party, as were other leaders of the African National Congress. We should have known that the South African government wasn’t letting him go free without exacting a huge price. It is difficult to look the gift horse in the mouth, but the silence created a vacuum which made it easier for the rule of international capitalists to stay in place, even as they appeared to give up political control.

Mandela’s early history is something to honor and remember but now his memory comes wrapped in the poison pill of acceptance by the corporate media and disreputable Democratic and Republican politicians. Now when right wingers condemn Mandela as a communist, his admirers cringe and deny what is true. Instead of examining what a communist is and why the party was supported by the movement, we see black people instead take the position of our enemies and use the word as a slur. We must remember that scorn from certain quarters is a badge of honor.

Contrast the reaction to Mandela’s death with that of the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. While Chavez was equally beloved around the world, the American government gave no glowing tributes and sent no high level delegation. Chavez was every bit as deserving of praise and honor but unlike Mandela he succeeded in standing up to empire. He personally protested against George W. Bush and even called him the devil at the United Nations. Hugo Chavez prevailed when American presidents wanted him out of office. He won re-election and shamed this country when he donated Venezuelan oil to help poor Americans stay warm in the winter. Of course Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton were absent from his funeral.

Nelson Mandela had difficult choices to make. He chose to accept an IMF loan [6] with strings attached that kept millions in poverty. He and his successors turned their backs on the Freedom Charter [7]. No one can know his intentions but the results of those decisions were disastrous [8] for the masses of black people in South Africa.

Mandela’s release from prison should have been seen as a new stage in the struggle and not the end of it. Those of us who came of age during the anti-apartheid movement and who truly loved the man have to admit the short comings of love when liberation is at stake.

There are many lessons to be learned during this time of mourning. Our emotions play an important role in inspiring us to take action against injustice but they can also betray us when we lack an understanding of what liberation really is.

Liberation may or may not come with a presidential inauguration. It certainly hasn’t come if the usual suspects in the corporate media, Pennsylvania Avenue and Downing Street suddenly give words of praise. The success of certain individuals is not liberation either. There are now black millionaires in South Africa but that does little good to the impoverished masses.

Liberated people don’t live in squalor. They earn more than a living wage. They need not fear loss of job or life if they protest their salaries or working conditions. They have free health care and education. They don’t fear incarceration and they don’t live in stratified societies. They live in safety and the law treats them all as equals to one another. They can protest and oppose the power structure without fear of repercussion. South Africa doesn’t fit these criteria, neither does the United States, and we who love freedom and justice shouldn’t spare anyone when we express these simple and obvious truths.

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. [9]Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

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Source URL: http://blackagendareport.com/content/freedom-rider-talking-about-mandela

The Real Mandela Behind All the Media Noise—a Special Dossier

Besides the essays in this dossier, please see also: The Mandela Years in Power

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Victorious Over Apartheid, Defeated by Neoliberalism

Mandela: a Dissenting Opinion

by JONATHAN COOK, Counterpunch

Nazareth.

Offering a dissenting opinion at this moment of a general outpouring of grief at Nelson Mandela’s death is not likely to court popularity. It is also likely to be misunderstood.

So let me start by recognising Mandela’s huge achievement in helping to bring down South African apartheid, and make clear my enormous respect for the great personal sacrifices he made, including spending so many years caged up for his part in the struggle to liberate his people. These are things impossible to forget or ignore when assessing someone’s life.

Nonetheless, it is important to pause during the widespread acclamation of his legacy, mostly by people who have never demonstrated a fraction of his integrity, to consider a lesson that most observers want to overlook.

Perhaps the best way to make my point is to highlight a mock memo written in 2001 by Arjan el-Fassed, from Nelson Mandela to the NYT’s columnist Thomas Friedman. It is a wonderful, humane denunciation of Friedman’s hypocrisy and a demand for justice for the Palestinians that Mandela should have written. [http://www.keghart.com/Mandela-Palestine]

Soon afterwards, the memo spread online, stripped of el-Fassed’s closing byline. Many people, including a few senior journalists, assumed it was written by Mandela and published it as such. It seemed they wanted to believe that Mandela had written something as morally clear-sighted as this about another apartheid system, an Israeli one that is at least the equal of that imposed for decades on black South Africans.

However, the reality is that it was not written by Mandela, and his staff even went so far as to threaten legal action against the author.

[pullquote]Mandela was rehabilitated into an “elder statesman” in return for South Africa being rapidly transformed into an outpost of neoliberalism, prioritising the kind of economic apartheid most of us in the west are getting a strong dose of now.[/pullquote]

Mandela spent most his adult life treated as a “terrorist”. There was a price to be paid for his long walk to freedom, and the end of South Africa’s system of racial apartheid. Mandela was rehabilitated into an “elder statesman” in return for South Africa being rapidly transformed into an outpost of neoliberalism, prioritising the kind of economic apartheid most of us in the west are getting a strong dose of now.

In my view, Mandela suffered a double tragedy in his post-prison years.

First, he was reinvented as a bloodless icon, one that other leaders could appropriate to legitimise their own claims, as the figureheads of the “democratic west”, to integrity and moral superiority. After finally being allowed to join the western “club”, he could be regularly paraded as proof of the club’s democratic credentials and its ethical sensibility.

Second, and even more tragically, this very status as icon became a trap in which he was required to act the “responsible” elder statesman, careful in what he said and which causes he was seen to espouse. He was forced to become a kind of Princess Diana, someone we could be allowed to love because he rarely said anything too threatening to the interests of the corporate elite who run the planet.

It is an indication of what Mandela was up against that the man who fought so hard and long against a brutal apartheid regime was so completely defeated when he took power in South Africa. That was because he was no longer struggling against a rogue regime but against the existing order, a global corporate system of power that he had no hope of challenging alone.

It is for that reason, rather simply to be contrarian, that I raise these failings. Or rather, they were not Mandela’s failings, but ours. Because, as I suspect Mandela realised only too well, one cannot lead a revolution when there are no followers.

For too long we have slumbered through the theft and pillage of our planet and the erosion of our democratic rights, preferring to wake only for the release of the next iPad or smart phone.

The very outpouring of grief from our leaders for Mandela’s loss helps to feed our slumber. Our willingness to suspend our anger this week, to listen respectfully to those watery-eyed leaders who forced Mandela to reform from a fighter into a notable, keeps us in our slumber. Next week there will be another reason not to struggle for our rights and our grandchildren’s rights to a decent life and a sustainable planet. There will always be a reason to worship at the feet of those who have no real power but are there to distract us from what truly matters.

No one, not even a Mandela, can change things by him or herself. There are no Messiahs on their way, but there are many false gods designed to keep us pacified, divided and weak.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

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Mandela’s Disturbing Legacy

by Stephen Lendman

On December 5, Mandela died peacefully at home in Johannesburg. Cause of death was respiratory failure. He was 95. Supporters called him a dreamer of big dreams. His legacy fell woefully short. More on that below.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation, Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, and Mandela Rhodes Foundation issued the following statement:

“It is with the deepest regret that we have learned of the passing of our founder, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela – Madiba. The Presidency of the Republic of South Africa will shortly make further official announcements. We want to express our sadness at this time. No words can adequately describe this enormous loss to our nation and to the world. We give thanks for his life, his leadership, his devotion to humanity and humanitarian causes. We salute our friend, colleague and comrade and thank him for his sacrifices for our freedom. The three charitable organisations that he created dedicate ourselves to continue promoting his extraordinary legacy.”

He’ll be buried according to his wishes in Qunu village. It’s where he grew up. In 1943, he joined the African National Congress (ANC). He co-founded its Youth League. He defended what he later called Thatcherism. On trial for alleged Sabotage Act violations, he said in court:

“The ANC has never at any period of its history advocated a revolutionary change in the economic structure of the country, nor has it, to the best of my recollection, ever condemned capitalist society.”

In 1964, he was sentenced to life in prison. He was mostly incarcerated on Robben Island. It’s in Table Bay. It’s around 7km offshore from Cape Town. In February 1990, he was released. In 1993, he received the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with South African President FW de Klerk.

Nobel Committee members said it was “for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa.” De Klerk enforced the worst of apartheid ruthlessness. In 1994, Mandela was elected president. He served from May 1994 – June 1999.

Apartheid Did Not Die” documentary followed. “Behind the modern face of democracy, the scourges of inequality, unemployment and homelessness persist,” he said.

White supremacy remained unchanged. It’s no different today. A few blacks share wealth, power and privilege. The vast majority of black society is worse off than under apartheid. Mandela embraced the worst of neoliberal harshness. His successors follow the same model. Pilger posed tough questions. He asked Mandela how ANC freedom fighting ended up embracing Thatcherism.

Mandela responded saying:

“You can put any label on it you like. You can call it Thatcherite but, for this country, privatization is the fundamental policy.”

Pilger discovered that 80% of South African children suffered poor health. One-fourth under age six were ill nourished. During Mandela’s tenure, more South Africans died from malnutrition and preventable diseases than under apartheid. Concentrated wealth is more extreme than ever. White farmers control over 80% of agricultural land. They dominate choicest areas. Pilger said about one-fourth of South Africa’s budget goes for interest on odious debt.

He explained how five major corporations control over three-fourths of business interests. They dominate South African life.

Concentrated wealth and power are extreme. Whites control about 90% of national wealth. A select few black businessmen, politicians and trade union leaders benefit with them. The dominant Anglo-American Corporation is hugely exploitive. Gold mining exacts an enormous human cost.

Pilger said one death and 12 serious injuries accompany each ton of gold mined. One-third of workers contract deadly lung disease. They’re left on their own to suffer and die. Post-apartheid democracy reflects the worst of free market capitalism. It’s bereft of freedom. Reform denies it.

Mandela’s “unbreakable promise” was forgotten. In 1990, two weeks before freed from prison, he said:

“The nationalization of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC (and changing) our views…is inconceivable. Black economic empowerment is a goal we fully support and encourage, but in our situation state control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable.”

In 1955, ANC’s Freedom Charter declared “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html // Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Why imperialism mourns Mandela

Bill Van Auken, wsws.org

The death of Nelson Mandela at the age of 95 has touched off a worldwide exercise in official mourning that is virtually without precedent.

No doubt working people in South Africa and internationally pay tribute to the courage and sacrifice demonstrated by the African National Congress leader—as well as thousands of others who lost their lives and freedom—during his long years of illegality, persecution and imprisonment under the hated Apartheid regime.

Capitalist governments and the corporate-controlled media the world over, however, have rushed to offer condolences for their own reasons. These include heads of states that supported South Africa’s apartheid rule and aided in the capture and imprisonment of Mandela as a “terrorist” half a century ago.

Barack Obama, who presides over the horrors of Guantanamo and a US prison system that holds over 1.5 million behind bars, issued a statement in which he declared himself “one of the countless millions who drew inspiration” from the man who spent 27 years on Robben Island.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, the standard-bearer of the right-wing Tory Party, ordered the flag flown at half-mast outside 10 Downing Street and proclaimed Mandela “a towering figure in our time, a legend in life and now in death—a true global hero.”

Billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, who ordered flags in New York City lowered, and Bill Gates felt compelled to issue their own statements.

What is noteworthy in the sanctimonious blather served up by the media on the occasion of Mandela’s death is the way in which a man whose life is inextricably bound up with the history and politics of South Africa is turned into an entirely apolitical icon, a plaster saint embodying, in the words of Obama, “being guided not by hate, but by love.”

What is it that the capitalist oligarchs in country after country really mourn in the death of Mandela? It is clearly not his will to resist an oppressive system—that is something they are all prepared to punish with imprisonment or drone missile assassination.

Rather, the answer is to be found in the present social and political crisis gripping South Africa, as well as the historic role played by Mandela in preserving capitalist interests in the country under the most explosive conditions.

It is significant that on the day before Mandela’s death, South Africa’s Institute for Justice and Reconciliation issued an annual report showing that those surveyed felt overwhelmingly that class inequality represented the paramount issue in South African society, with twice as many (27.9 percent) citing class as opposed to race (14.6 percent) as the “greatest impediment to national reconciliation.”

Two decades after the ending of the legal racial oppression of Apartheid, the class question has come to the fore in South Africa, embodied in the heroic mass struggles of the miners and other sections of the working class that have come into direct conflict with the African National Congress.

These eruptions found their sharpest expression in the August 16, 2012 massacre of 34 striking miners at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, a mass killing whose bloody images recalled the worst episodes of Apartheid repression at Sharpeville and Soweto. This time, however, the bloodletting was orchestrated by the ANC government and its allies in the official trade union federation, COSATU.

South Africa today ranks as the most socially unequal country on the face of the planet. The gap between wealth and poverty and the number of poor South Africans are both greater than they were when Mandela walked out of prison in 1990. Fully 60 percent of the country’s income goes to the top 10 percent, while the bottom 50 percent lives below the poverty line, collectively receiving less than 8 percent of total earnings. At least 20 million are jobless, including over half of the younger workers.

Meanwhile, under the mantle of programs like “Black Economic Empowerment,” a thin layer of black ex-ANC leaders, trade union officials and small businessmen has become very rich from incorporation onto boards of directors, acquisitions of stock, and contracts with the government. It is under these conditions that ANC governments that have followed Mandela’s, first under Thabo Mbeki and now Jacob Zuma, have come to be seen as the corrupt representatives of a wealthy ruling establishment.

Mandela, who played a less and less active role in the country’s political life, nevertheless served as a facade for the ANC, which traded on his history of sacrifice and his image of humble dignity to hide its own corrupt self-dealing. Behind the facade, of course, Mandela and his family raked in millions, with his children and grandchildren active in some 200 private companies.

The New York Times published an article Friday under the worried headline, “Mandela’s Death Leaves South Africa Without Its Moral Center.” Clearly, there are fears that the passing of Mandela will serve to strip the ANC of what little credibility it has left, opening the way to intensified class struggle.

Concern among capitalist governments and corporate oligarchs over the implications of Mandela’s passing for the current crisis in South Africa is bound up with gratitude for services rendered by the ex-president and ANC leader. In the mid-1980s, when the South African ruling class began its negotiations with Mandela and the ANC on ending Apartheid, the country was in deep economic crisis and teetering on the brink of civil war. The government felt compelled to impose a state of emergency, having lost control of the black working class townships.

The international and South African mining corporations, banks and other firms, together with the most conscious elements within the Apartheid regime, recognized that the ANC—and Mandela in particular—were the only ones capable of quelling a revolutionary upheaval. It was for that purpose he was released from prison 23 years ago.

Utilizing the prestige it had acquired through its association with armed struggle and its socialistic rhetoric, the ANC worked to contain the mass uprising that it neither controlled nor desired and subordinate it to a negotiated settlement that preserved the wealth and property of the international corporations and the country’s white capitalist rulers.

Before taking office, Mandela and the ANC ditched large parts of the movement’s program, particularly those planks relating to public ownership of the banks, mines and major industries. They signed a secret letter of intent with the International Monetary Fund pledging to implement free market policies, including drastic budget cuts, high interest rates and the scrapping of all barriers to the penetration of international capital.

In doing so, Mandela realized a vision he had enunciated nearly four decades earlier, when he wrote that enacting the ANC’s program would mean: “For the first time in the history of this country, the non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own in their own name and right mills and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before.”

However, this “flourishing,” which boosted the profits of the transnational mining firms and banks while creating a layer of black multi-millionaires, has been paid for through the intensified exploitation of South African workers.

The ignominious path trod by the ANC was not unique. During the same period, virtually every one of the so-called national liberation movements, from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Sandinistas, pursued similar policies, making their peace with imperialism and pursuing wealth and privilege for a narrow layer.

In this context, the death of Mandela underscores the fact that there exists no way forward for the working class in South Africa—and for that matter, worldwide—outside of the class struggle and socialist revolution.

A new party must be built, founded on the Theory of Permanent Revolution elaborated by Leon Trotsky, which established that in countries like South Africa, the national bourgeoisie, dependent upon imperialism and fearful of revolution from below, is incapable of resolving the fundamental democratic and social tasks facing the masses. This can be achieved only by the working class taking power into its own hands and overthrowing capitalism, as part of the international struggle to put an end to imperialism and establish world socialism.

Bill Van Auken is a senior political activist and analyst with wsws.org, information arm of the Socialist Equality Party.

Fool’s Gold in Ukraine

The EU / Ukrainian Partnership

by JEFFREY SOMMERS, Counterpunch

The proposed EU/Ukraine trade partnership extends the promise of European improved living standards for Ukraine. Oligarchs who privatized Soviet industry and frequently exported profits to offshore banks rather than re-investing in their own country have dominated Ukraine’s economy. Ukrainian desire for higher living standards and better government is understandable. The question is will partnership with the EU improve the lives of Ukrainians?

EU expansion has often produced disappointing results for people both East and West (although banks profited handsomely). The aspiration by Ukrainians for prosperous, egalitarian societies once associated with Europe’s social democracies is understandable.  This expectation of the EU bringing the ‘Social Europe’ model to Ukraine, however, might be dashed on the reality of the EU’s current neoliberalizing turbulent tides. While many hoped past EU expansion would represent an enlargement of the ‘Social Europe’ project, the really existing experience has been one of using (if not exploiting) East European labor that creates a ‘precariat’ of insecure migrant East European labor in West Europe. Meanwhile, West European wages have been kept down. Moreover, EU expansion into the former Warsaw Pact nations in the 1990s presented West European manufacturers with an El Dorado market for consumer goods. This worked to reduce West European unemployment created from the tight credit and fiscal policies of the Maastricht Agreement to create the euro. Furthermore, EU expansion has provided a bonanza for West European banks who loaded down previously debt-free East-European properties with big mortgages. This provided windfall profits for banks and well-connected East European insiders. It represents, however, a de facto tax for common people who must then take on huge mortgages to get housing.

West Europe is looking to get another injection of economic vitality by reprising the same game again through eastward expansion of its influence. The gains will not be as great with this reprise.  The markets east are poorer and smaller than from the initial West Europe expansion into the former Warsaw Pact nations. Europe’s eroding ‘Social Europe’ model is not for export, but its consumer goods and finance capital are. West Europe can expect in return to be on the receiving end of more social pathologies and crime from the East.

A better solution for Ukraine (and Russia alike) would be infrastructural investment at home, with roads being a top priority.  This would require clamping down on corruption in order to reduce price gouging by well-connected insiders: easier said than done, I know.  Identifying Soviet-era niche technologies (space, etc.) to develop in partnership with foreigners could also facilitate economic development.  These industries represent an equity requiring decades of investment for newcomers to enter. Ukraine and CIS states generally would be wise to retain and expand these advantages.

Ukrainians themselves must decide on their best course of action. Current conditions in both Russia and Ukraine are no model to aspire to. Yet, Ukrainians will be sorely disappointed if they think partnership with the EU will bring the Social Europe model (itself under serious attack in the West) to Ukraine. The better option is to pursue an alternative model based on local development and engagement with others from a position of autonomy. Many Ukrainians think partnership with the EU will provide a legal framework and enforcement of rules that will cleanse their economies of corruption and introduce European best practices.  The reality, however, may be to lock them into neoliberal legal frameworks that diminishes Ukraine’s prospects for development, while flooding Ukraine with West European products and speculative bank capital. This could leave Ukrainians with uncertain employment prospects, thus reducing them to a cheap ‘reserve army of labor’ for West Europe. Ukrainians and Russians have both been failed by their respective governments and economic elites. Expecting transformation to come from the EU, however, will likely prove disappointing and only further delay the major changes needed to transform their economies. Moreover, West European social democracies will be undermined by increased labor immigration. If ‘partnership’ ever evolves into full EU membership, West Europeans will also find the East’s rightwing politics further diluting the power of leftwing and Green politics in West Europe.

In short, there is much to support in the current protests against corrupt Ukrainian government rule. Yet, protesters should give more thought as to what alternative will deliver the goals they strive for. Entanglement with EU free-trade areas is likely to bring about as much ‘hope and change’ as NAFTA did for Mexican labor and the election of Barack Obama did for progressives in the US.

JEFFREY SOMMERS is an associate professor and Senior Fellow of the Institute of World Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is also visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book The Contradictions of Austerity. In addition to CounterPunch he also publishes in The Financial Times, The Guardian, TruthOut and routinely appears as an expert on global television. He can be reached at: Jeffrey.sommers@fulbrightmail.org

Marxism, morality, and human nature

MARXISM

Marx rejected bourgeois morality in favor of an ethics of human emancipation

By Phil Gasper

Issue #82: Critical Thinking

Bourgeois family, 19th cent.

ACCORDING TO the German socialist and philosopher Karl Vörlander writing in the early twentieth century, “The moment anyone started to talk to Marx about morality, he would roar with laughter.”

I don’t know whether Vörlander’s story is true, but there is certainly plenty to laugh about when our rulers talk about morality. Almost invariably they use it as a way of promoting their own interests, pretending they are acting for the common good or for the benefit of humanity.

But it is hard to believe that morality is nothing more than ruling-class ideology. Most people become socialists because they think that some things should be opposed not just because they threaten their own material interests, but because they think they are wrong in and of themselves—racism and sexism, imperialist wars that kill hundreds of thousands of people, a system that destroys people’s lives in order to make a tiny number of people fantastically rich.

Where, though, do our ideas of morality come from? As a materialist, Marx rejected the idea that moral rules have a divine source and are imposed on human society from the outside. But he also rejected the idea, defended by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, that morality had a purely rational basis.

Kant argued that moral rules had to apply equally to all rational agents. He thought that it followed from this that some rules could be shown to be valid and others invalid. A valid rule is one that you would consistently wish that everyone would follow, and an invalid rule one that you would not consistently wish to be universalized. So Kant held that lying was morally wrong, because if everyone lied when it was to their advantage to do so, trust and communication would be undermined and your own goals would be frustrated.

But in the early nineteenth century Hegel argued that Kantian morality was all form and no content—or, rather, that the content was smuggled in from elsewhere. For instance, Kant believed that theft was wrong, because if everyone stole it would undermine the institution of private property. This, though, leaves open the question of why we should have private property in the first place. Hegel’s response was that the content of morality comes from cultural and historical traditions. But while this is true in a descriptive sense, it tells us nothing about if and when those traditions should be accepted or rejected.

The most influential moral theories since the eighteenth century have tended to see morality as a necessary way of holding human impulses in check. A central component of Kant’s theory, for instance, is that morality has to control human desires in order to prevent social conflict.

Underlying these views is the assumption that human beings are competitive individuals who seek their own self-interest and who will engage in a war of all against all if left to their own devices. Morality is supposed to moderate the war so that society can hold together.

IN HIS Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and elsewhere, Marx starts with a very different understanding of human nature. In this conception, we are not naturally competitive, rather, we are social creatures who cannot survive without cooperating with each other. Modern science confirms this view. Humans did not evolve as a collection of atomized individuals constantly at war with one another, but in social groups that depended on mutual support. According to the anthropologist Richard Lee:

Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality [about 5,000 years ago], people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalized reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations.

The idea that violence and war have always been part of human society may seem like common sense. But an examination of the historical evidence reveals a very different picture. As the anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson points out, “the global archaeological record contradicts the idea that war was always a feature of human existence; instead, the record shows that warfare is largely a development of the past 10,000 years.”

Warfare became a feature of human society only as a consequence of specific historical developments—crucially the establishment of permanent settlements with accumulated wealth, and the emergence of “social hierarchy, an elite, perhaps with its own interests and rivalries.” Rather than war being the expression of some general human propensity towards violence, it reflects the interests of those at the top of society who are most likely to benefit from it.

Evidence of this kind supports the view that human beings are not naturally violent, selfish, competitive, greedy, or xenophobic, it is not natural for human societies to be organized hierarchically or for women to have lower social status than men, and capitalism does not exist because it uniquely reflects human nature, as its defenders often claim.

Marx recognized that in different social and historical circumstances, human behavior and psychology can vary dramatically, just as in different physical circumstances water can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas. As he put it, “the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.”

Nevertheless, the range of potential human behaviors has limits, ultimately rooted in human biology and psychology. If such limits did not exist, then it would be possible for there to be class societies in which the majority of the population was socially conditioned to accept its exploitation and oppression. But the whole history of class societies is a refutation of that idea.

No one was more aware of this than Marx, which is why from his earliest writings he condemns capitalism as inhumane—a society in which most human beings cannot live satisfying lives, engage in fulfilling work, or relate in satisfactory ways to other people or to the rest of the natural world. In other words, capitalism frustrates basic human needs and human nature. In capitalist society,

labor is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being; … in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home.

His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague….

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions—eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

In other words capitalism is not natural, and the artificial limits imposed on human development by our current forms of social organization prevent the vast majority of human beings from realizing their potential.

SO HOW does this relate to morality? Marx’s view of morality is a lot closer to the views of the ancient Greeks, particularly Aristotle, than it is to modern philosophers like Kant. Rather than thinking of morality as a set of rules to hold human nature in check, he sees morality as being about how human nature can flourish—how people can fully develop their capacities.

However, there is a twist.

For the past 10,000 years or so, human society has been divided into antagonistic classes, and that has meant that morality has developed not as a general theory of human emancipation, but as a set of rules by which each class attempts to further its own interests.

Marx points out the way in which these different class moralities come into conflict in capitalism:

The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the laborer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to one of definite normal duration.

There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labor, i.e., the working-class.

But it does not follow that each of these moralities, the morality of the capitalists and the morality of the working class, is equally valid. For Marx argues that under capitalism, the working class is a universal class. In pursuing its own interests, the working class comes to represent the general interests of all humanity. Because it is in its interests to overthrow capitalism by emancipating itself, it will at the same time emancipate the whole of humanity.

In the struggle to end exploitation and oppression, workers will have to challenge the morality of the ruling class. When workers occupy a factory or homeowners refuse to leave a foreclosed property, capitalist morality is challenged. At a higher stage of the struggle it may be necessary to use force against the violence deployed by the state.

As the British Marxist Chris Harman explained it,

Marx saw that what is of cardinal importance is not the personal behaviour of the individual but the struggle between social forces, not personal morality but the fight to establish the good society. And in that struggle, the language of moralism was all too often the language used by the ruling class in order to constrain those who opposed it….

By contrast, every real development of working class struggle does begin to throw up the sort of values that point to the possibility of a truly cooperative and therefore truly human society. As against the atomization of the market, such struggles raise notions of solidarity, of mutual support, of a pooling of abilities, of cooperative endeavor.

Working-class morality is based on the goal of ending exploitation and oppression, but this in turn means not all actions can be justified. “The great revolutionary end,” wrote Leon Trotksy, “spurns those base means and ways which set one part of the working class against other parts…or lowers the faith of the masses in themselves and their organization.”

So while Marxism sees a basis for morality in shared human nature, while society is divided into classes, there can be no universal morality. Nevertheless, by fighting for its own interests, the working class makes it possible for such a morality to emerge. As Engels put it:

We maintain … that all moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonisms, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed.

That in this process there has on the whole been progress in morality, as in all other branches of human knowledge, no one will doubt. But we have not yet passed beyond class morality. A really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life.

What We Need is a Movement!

Saving Social Security and Closing the Income Gap Go Hand-in-Hand

by DAVE LINDORFF

Contrary to the oft-repeated (without challenge by the media) that social security is something akin to a handout, like welfare, it is not. It is an entitlement paid for by the beneficiaries as forced savings.*

Talk about a no-brainer!

The $2.5-trillion Social Security Trust Fund, which current workers, including the much-maligned Baby Boom generation, have been bulking up with our 6.2% payroll tax and the 6.2% that our employers have to pay, is slated to be exhausted by 2036-8. Unless more money is injected into the system to cover the tsunami of retirees born between 1946 and 1964, the program, if it were just running on current payroll taxes, would only be able to cover 75% of promised benefits to current retirees.

At the same time, the rich are getting richer every year, and the rest of us poorer.
Income tax rates for the rich are far lower now than they were in the 1990s, ‘80s or in any prior decade. Meanwhile loopholes and deductions and exemptions for the wealthy keep getting added to the tax code to help make them richer. (Those rich enough to be able to use the Schedule A tax form get to claim all mortgage interest, including for vacation homes. They get to deduct the cost of fancy insurance plans and pricy medical care, they get to deduct their state and local taxes, and they get taxed much less than even a low-income wage-earner on income they earn from investments.)

[pullquote]There are so many reasons to toss this insanely rotten system out! The pus literally oozes from every single pore of its body politic. Having the wealthy pay the FICA tax on all their income, including investment income, would significantly reduce the wealth gap in the country, both by at least slightly reducing wealthy incomes, and by dramatically improving the retirement living standards of the majority of Americans. Incredibly, almost nobody is suggesting this approach in Congress, where a disproportionate percentage of senators and representatives are millionaires and multi-millionaires.[/pullquote]

Everyone, except the rich themselves of course, agrees that the widening wealth gap in the US (now about the same as in Jamaica and Argentina) is a terrible thing, and everyone agrees that something needs to be done to keep Social Security well-funded.

What isn’t being said is that the two problems are linked and can be at least partially solved simultaneously.

Think about it: As things stand, only the first $113,400 of wage income is subject to the Social Security tax — the so-called FICA tax. Even if you earn $2 million or $200 million a year, you still only pay that 6.2% FICA tax on the first $113,400 of it–a maximum tax of $7,030.80 per person or $14,061.60 for employee and employer.

If the cap were eliminated, as was done long ago for the Medicare tax, so that the rich and their employers — or rich people themselves if they are self-employed — had to pay the full 12.4% tax on their income, almost all of the shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund’s ability to pay for the retirement benefits of the Baby Boomers and subsequent retirees would be eliminated. If, beyond that, investment income was also made subject to the Social Security tax, either as a straight percentage of profits, or as a small 0.25% to 0.5% tax on stock and bond transactions, not only would the entire shortfall be gone, but there would be money to do what an increasing number of Americans are saying must be done:increase retirement benefits.

(As I wrote recently, Social Security in the US only provides for about 30% of the living expenses of average retirees, leaving them on their own to figure out to pay for the rest, while in most of the rest of the developed world, retirement programs provide close to 100% of living expenses. In Finland, for example, the fully state-run pension system is designed to allow virtually everyone to receive in retirement an income that enables them to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living.)

Having the wealthy pay the FICA tax on all their income, including investment income, would significantly reduce the wealth gap in the country, both by at least slightly reducing wealthy incomes, and by dramatically improving the retirement living standards of the majority of Americans.

Incredibly, almost nobody is suggesting this approach in Congress, where a disproportionate percentage of senators and representatives are millionaires and multi-millionaires. Even among the public, there is little understanding about how Social Security works, and how easy it would be to solve its funding problem.

Instead of talking about collecting more in taxes from the wealthy to adequately fund retirement and disability programs for all Americans, we have Republicans and most Democrats alike talking about ways of cutting Social Security benefits to future retirees. For example we have President Obama’s proposal to adopt a different method for adjusting benefits for inflation. This idea of adopting what is called a “chained Consumer Price Index,” would take the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly “market basket” of goods and services used to calculate the inflation rate, and would substitute cheaper items for things that rise significantly in price. For example, if beef prices suddenly spiked, the Chained-CPI “market basket” would substitute chicken. If chicken went up too, it would substitute beans. The assumption, based upon no scientific data, is that retirees and the disabled would make these substitutions in their spending. There is no scientific basis for switching from the CPI to the chained-CPI, though. In fact, the elderly and disabled, as a rule, have a hardertime changing their behavior, eating habits, or living quarters to adjust for price spikes than do younger workers. No matter though. The heartless hacks in government, mostly beholden to large campaign donors and Wall Street investment houses, all of whom want to gut Social Security, rather than save or fix it, want it cut. And because that is what the corporate media are reporting, even many people who could end up having tens of thousands of dollars stolen from their retirement benefits by this accounting sleight-of-hand think it is a necessary “reform” needed to “save” Social Security.

It’s not.

If anything, even the CPI currently in use understates that impact of inflation on Social Security benefits.

The beauty of viewing Social Security not as some costly “entitlement” that needs to be cut, as conservatives portray it, but rather as a necessary program that insures that the country takes adequate care of its elderly and infirm, and that can be securely, and even better funded than it is now by raising the taxes paid into the program by the currently coddled rich, is that it offers a pain-free way to eliminate the looming Social Security funding shortfall while, at the same time, shrinking society’s burgeoning wage gap.

I say pain-free because when the rich and their employers (or the companies they own), have to pay a combined 12.4% tax on the full amount of their annual incomes, instead of just on the first $113,400 of it, there is no pain involved — unless it’s just the psychological pain of having to give money to the government that they didn’t have to fork over before. They don’t have to turn down the thermostat, or skip a meal, or stop buying prime rib and lobster. They don’t have to worry about meeting the rent payment or the mortgage.

If we could get a movement going around such a real reform of Social Security, we might be able to build on it, and start going after the rest of the tax breaks that the wealthy have been piling up. Take the mortgage tax deduction. Why should it be limitless? If there is an argument for having society subsidize home ownership, then make it fair: let’s offer all taxpayers who have to take out a mortgage to buy their home the same limited interest payment deduction — say a $1000 tax credit (that would be the equivalent of limiting the interest rate deduction on the Schedule A form to about $5000, which is about the typical interest rate paid on a $100,000 mortgage, except that it would be available to all — not just those who are able to use the Schedule A deduction form. The same kind of limit could be placed on the amount of state and local taxes that could be deducted from income.

The possibilities for progressive reform are limitless, once Social Security is successfully tackled.

To borrow and adapt a line or two from Arlo Guthrie’s famous song “Alice’s Restaurant”:

“One reform, just one reform to make Social Security solvent into the indefinite future, and we’d have a progressive success. And if we had two reforms, one of Social Security and a tax on stock and bond transactions (in harmony), they may think we’re radicals. But if we had three progressive reforms. Three, can you imagine? Three progressive reforms like applying the FICA Tax to all income, taxing stock and bond transactions, and eliminating unlimited mortgage interest deductions and deductions for mortgage interest on vacation homes. Why they may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said Fifty people a day walking in to the Capitol demanding improved retirement benefits? Friends they may thinks it’s a movement.”

And like Arlo said, with reference to ending the Vietnam War, that’s what we need. A movement to take government back from the oligarchs and the coddled rich, and return it to just average working people.

Social Security is the key. Every American depends upon it, for her or himself, for parents and grandparents, and for our children. If we can’t unite around a movement to demand that Social Security be made into a well-funded system that provides a decent retirement for all, we might as well hang it up when it comes to trying to achieve other progressive goals.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

*Button illustration courtesy of CrankyBeagle, which creates and manufactures revolutionary media like buttons, T-shirts, mugs, etc. CrankyBeagle donates a generous portion of their income to TGP, to maintain this publication alive. If you would like to show some support for what we do here, check out their catalog today!