GILBERT MERCIER 
From people’s rule to a broken social contract

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is ironic, considering democracy’s pitiful state worldwide that, in accordance to its etymology, it literally means “common people’s rule” or, more simply, “people’s power.” The English term democracy and the 14th-century French word democratie come from the Greek demokratia via the Latin democratia. The Greek radical demos means “common people,” and kratos means “rule, or power.” How did we manage to pervert such a laudable notion of power to the people and diametrically turn it into a global system of rule at large under the principles of oligarchy and plutocracy? Everywhere we look, from east to west and north to south, plutocrats and oligarchs are firmly in charge: puppet masters of the political class. They have transformed democracy into a parody of itself and a toxic form of government. The social contract implied in a democratic form of governance is broken.

At the start of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, written in 1762 and one of the inspirations for the French revolution 27 years later, the Enlightenment philosopher wrote: “Men are born free, yet everywhere are in chains.” The key argument of The Social Contract is that only those governments that function with the express “consent of the governed” have a legitimate right to exist. Further, Rousseau introduced the fundamental and revolutionary notion of sovereignty of the people, as opposed to sovereignty of the state or the rulers. For Rousseau, the only legitimate form of political authority is the one agreed upon by all the people in a social contract with full respect of everyone’s natural birthrights to equality, freedom and individual liberty.

The electoral process is an essential part of “the consent of the governed” defined by Rousseau. In almost all of the so-called democratic countries, however, the important act of voting to elect the people’s representatives has become an exercise in futility. Today politicians, who still have the audacity to call themselves public servants, are the obedient executors of the trans-national global corporate elite. These politicians are actors who are cast to perform in opaque screenplays written by top corporate power brokers and marketed to the public like products. In this sad state of affairs that passes for democracy, citizens have become blind consumers of  products, which are political figureheads working  for global corporate interests. For any organism to remain healthy, it must be able to excrete. The same applies to our collective social body, but instead of regularly eliminating our political residue and flushing it away, we recycle it.

Neoliberal corporate imperialism: a global one-party system

Mark Twain wrote: “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” This quote from the gilded age has never been more accurate than it is today. A vote implies real choice, and we have none. From France to Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, India and of course the United States — all of which pass for great democracies — political choices have become largely reduced to two electable political parties with different names to accommodate the local cultural flavors. This comforting idea of an option between left and right that spices up democracies’ voting menus is a farce. For example, in France, the so-called socialist Francois Hollande and his right-wing predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy are both docile servants of neoliberal and imperial policies dictated from elsewhere. Both, Sarkozy and Hollande, are proponents of austerity measures imposed by financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, etc.), and also imperialist actions such as rejoining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and intervening militarily in Libya (Sarkozy) and Mali (Hollande).

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The key argument of The Social Contract is that only those governments that function with the express “consent of the governed” have a legitimate right to exist.

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The United Kingdom offers the example of the phony difference between Labor, the party of warmonger in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tony Blair, and Tory, the party of warmonger in Libya, Afghanistan and Syria, David Cameron. This observation extends, of course, to the fake choice between Democrats and Republicans in the United States: the names change periodically, but the neoliberal imperialist policies remain the same. In reality, the pseudo two-party system accommodates a one-party power structure that is financed and ruled by the same people everywhere and serves identical interests. This fake two-party system maintains the appearance of democracy by giving people the impression that voting matters. If voting makes no difference, then what can be done?

Power to the people: challenging unelected global-governance institutions

David Cameron is the current mask of the plutocracy in Britain. His rule is no different than that we see in other so-called “democracies”. / click to expand

Although there is rampant dissatisfaction with politicians globally, few people are willing to admit that democracy is broken or take direct action to create a new system. According to an October 2014 poll, only six percent of US voters think that their Congress is doing a good job, and 65 percent rate its performance as being poor or very poor. Even more telling of the popular sense of an assumed general political corruption, 63 percent of US voters think that most members of Congress are willing to sell their votes for either cash or campaign contributions. In France, President Hollande’s approval rating has crashed to 13 percent: the lowest for any president since the early 1960s. Despite France’s revolutionary history, the country’s constitution gives its president the power to remain in office until the full term of his five-year mandate and, if necessary, to rule by decree.

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(click to expand)

In our current supra-national world order, however, to focus popular dissatisfaction on interchangeable figureheads such as Francois Hollande, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Narendra Modi, Dilma Rousseff, Angela Merkel, etc., is a largely counterproductive undertaking. All are expendable. Instead, the global public opinion should contest the legitimacy of unelected global-governance institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, United Nations, World Trade Organization (WTO), and other powerful non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and consortia like the World Economic Forum. These institutions dictate global policies, draft secret treaties such as the trans-pacific partnership agreement (TPP) concerning billions of people, and largely constitute the global elite. Such global institutions would have to be elected by the world citizenry for global governance to be viewed as being remotely democratic.

All revolutions need revolution

“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it” wrote Howard Zinn. People worldwide are fed up with their politicians, and they are protesting. Yet, as if most are suffering from a collective Stockholm syndrome, they are not sufficiently pro-active to rid themselves of their abusers by all means necessary. Voting was meant to be a sacrosanct civic duty in a democracy, but it has become the unconscious action of sleepwalkers.

In 1789, toppling the monarchy was a tall order in France. The intellectual inspiration for this revolution came from the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu, who can be viewed as the founding fathers of modern democracy.  If the veneer of the Enlightenment philosophers’ discourse has survived time, the spirit of it has been gutted out. The elite of corporate global governance have trampled the social contract. People who had gained their freedom during 200 years are everywhere back in chains. Although an increasing number of people realize that a drastic systemic change is imperative, few are willing to admit that nothing short of a global revolution can challenge the entrenched plutocratic world order.

Obama, Romney, Bush—you call that a choice? (click to expand)

In the aftermath of such a revolution, or ideally before it, we must redefine the parameters of what should guarantee representative governance in real democracy with common people’s rule. Real democracy works best on a small scale. In ancient Greece, for example, democracy worked because its scale was limited to small communities in which citizens personally knew their politicians. Today, pushes for autonomy in regions such as Catalonia and Scotland represent the aspirations of people for smaller governance and their reactions against globalization and the threat to their cultural identities. On the other hand, global problems such as pollution, the squandering of limited resources, climate change and the current mass extinction, must be dealt with globally to have any impact. Therefore a type of direct democracy is also needed to deal with global issues; this could consist, for example, of global referendums on critical issues. The current systems of supposed democratic governance are corrupt and decayed; after we demolish them and reconstruct democracy for our times, it might finally, for us, become true to its name.

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Gilbert Mercier is the Editor in Chief of News Junkie Post.

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Piketty: Tediously telling us the obvious. In a way the pinnacle of useless mainstream economic theory. Statistical economists are in a way the willful moles of a notoriously myopic profession.

“I am Not a Marxist”

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen the “Public” Broadcasting System Newshour’s Paul Solman sat down with the overnight academic rock-star Thomas Piketty at the height of the latter’s celebrity in the United States (US) last spring, Solman’s first question was about his politics:

Solman: “Capital, capitale, the name of Karl Marx’s famous work, so are you a French Marxist?”

Piketty: “Not at all. No. I am not a Marxist. I turned 18 when the Berlin Wall fell, and I traveled to Eastern Europe to see the fall of the communist dictatorship….I had never had any temptation for communism or, you know, Marxism.” [1]

The celebrated French economist Piketty may have invited comparisons with the great anti-capitalist Marx by writing a bestselling tome titled Capital in the 21st Century (NY: Belknap, 2014), using Marx-like (or Marx-mimicking) phrases like “the central contradiction of capitalism” and “the fundamental laws of capitalism,” and arguing that economic inequality is deeply rooted in the institutional sinews of the profit system. But in his surprise spring and summer US bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Belknap, 2014) Piketty tells us that Marx was wrong. While he admits that “Modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge… have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality,” he argues that they “have made it possible to avoid the Marxist apocalypse.” (Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p.1, emphasis added).

In the introduction to his magnum opus, Piketty says that he “belongs to a generation that came of age listening to news of the collapse of the [Soviet bloc] communist dictatorships,” something that “vaccinated [him] for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism….” He says he “ha[s] no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se – especially since social inequalities are not in themselves a problem as long as they are justified, that is, ‘founded upon common utility,’ as article 1 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen  proclaims.” (Piketty, 31, emphasis added)

Savage Inequalities Right Out of Capitalism

But what justifications of “common utility” can possibly be found in the extraordinary level of the socioeconomic disparity the profits system has brought into being today? Just here in the US, where 16 million children languish below the federal government’s inadequate poverty level, the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90% and a probably comparable share of the nation’s “democratically elected” officials. Six Walmart heirs have more wealth between them than the bottom 40%. Between 1983 and 2010, the Economic Policy Institute has calculated, 74% of the gains in wealth in the U.S. went to the richest 5%, while the bottom 60% suffered a decline.

This savage inequality comes courtesy of the class-based socioeconomic regime called capitalism, a defining aspect of which is its constant underlying tendency towards the concentration of more wealth in fewer hands – a tendency Piketty demonstrates with more than two centuries of brilliantly compiled and analyzed data. It also comes from forms of elite business-class agency that Piketty does not come close to thoroughly examining. Last May, the left economist Jack Rasmus rightly took Piketty to task for missing two leading explanations for dramatically increased inequality in the US since the 1970s: “the manipulation of global financial assets and speculative financial trading” and the “reducing of labor costs across the board.” Focusing almost exclusively on changes in the tax system (the third leading explanation by Rasmus’ account), Piketty ignores both the remarkable proliferation and de-/non-regulation of financial instruments (credit default swaps and other complex derivatives and financial “innovations”) and the “top-down class war” (former UAW president Douglass Fraser) that corporations have waged on unions, wages, job benefits, and the social safety net over the last four decades. These are critical omissions.[2]

An Alternative System? 

Does the misery and collapse of the Soviet Union/bloc really discredit Marxism or other forms of “anticapitalism”? “One can debate the meaning of the term ‘socialism,’” Noam Chomsky noted in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, “but if it means anything, it means control of production by the workers themselves, not owners and managers who rule them and control all decisions, whether in capitalist enterprises or an absolutist state.”[3]Bearing that consideration (true to Marx) in mind and adding in the question of who controls the economic surplus, the US Marxist economist Richard Wolff reasonably describes the Soviet experiment as a form of “state capitalism.” Under the Soviet model, “hired workers produced surpluses that were appropriated and distributed by…state officials who functioned as employers. Thus, Soviet industry was actually an example of state capitalism in its class structure.” By calling itself socialist – a description of “Marxist” Russia that US Cold Warriors and business propagandists eagerly embraced, for obvious reasons – the Soviet Union “prompted the redefinition of socialism to mean state capitalism.”[4]

In a mostly flattering review of Piketty’s book, the Brooklyn-based Marx fan and political-economic commentator Doug Henwood remarked that “the USSR…for all its problems, was living proof that an alternative [to capitalism] economic system was possible.”[5] Alternative post-capitalist systems are indeed achievable, but Henwood’s statement on Soviet Russia is dubious in light of the Soviet Union’s class structure and demise.

The nature and collapse of the Soviet system might with reason be seen as discrediting the “lazy anti-capitalism” of say, the old (Stalinist) French Communist Party. But, as Henwood wrote in his Piketty review, and here we must concur, “Anticapitalist rhetoric need not be lazy.” Marx’s certainly wasn’t. Neither is that of numerous subsequent radical thinkers and activists like, say, Chomsky or Wolff. (Or Sweezy or Baran, Huberman and dozens of others.—Eds)

“Dark Prophecy”? 

What is “the Marxist apocalypse” that we have “avoided” in Piketty’s view? Piketty means the growing division of Western industrial society between a wealthy bourgeoisie on one hand and a vast ever more miserable property-less proletariat, leading to working class socialist/communist revolution – what he calls “Marx’s dark prophecy.” (Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p.9).

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Piketty’s insidious choice of words reflects his own class bias (in favor of the capitalist elites). 

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Piketty is correct that the European and North American socialist revolutions that many leftists dreamed of didn’t happen in the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Neither did proletarian immiseration on the scale that Marx predicted – at least not in the core Western countries at the center of capitalist development. But why call Marx’s dialectical divination “apocalyptic” and “dark”? Piketty’s word choices strongly suggest elite bias: it’s always been the ruling classes who have most particularly found radical anticapitalists’ ideas catastrophic, for obvious reasons. For socialist, communist, and left anarchist revolutionaries of the mid and late-19th century, the overthrow of private capital and its amoral profits system and the replacement of the capitalist ruling class by the democratic reign of the associated producers and citizens in service to the common good was hardly an apocalypse. It was for them the dawning of the end of the long human pre-history of class rule, ushering in the possibility of a world beyond exploitation and the de facto class dictatorship of privileged owners. It was a “true realm of freedom” beyond endless toil and necessity and “worthy of …‘human nature.’” (Marx, Capital, v.3, p.820). “In the place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms,” Marx and his indispensable comrade Frederick Engels proclaimed in their 1848 Communist Manifesto, “we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

The Capitalist Apocalypse That Is

Another, more genuinely dark question arises.   Have we really “avoid[ed]” Marxist, well, capitalist apocalypse in the years since Marx wrote? Forget for a moment the cataclysmic global wars, imperial policies, abject plutocracy, and misery of the 20th and early 21st centuries, terrible problems that Marxist and other radical intellectuals reasonably root to no small degree in the system of class rule called capitalism. Never mind the global pauperization that has spread like something out of the Communist Manifesto in the neoliberal era, however much the rich nations may have avoided Piketty’s “Marxist apocalypse.”

Put all that aside for a moment, if you can, and reflect on the growing environmental catastrophe that now poses a genuine threat of human extinction. Marx suggested two stark alternatives in the Manifesto: “either…a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” Can there be any serious doubt in the current age of accelerating and catastrophic climate change that the very “modern economic growth” that Piketty praises for having kept “the Marxist apocalypse” at bay threatens to bring about “the common ruin of the contending classes” – indeed the degradation and final destruction of life on Earth – because it is taking place under the command of capital? More than merely dangerous, uncomfortable, and expensive, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) threatens the world’s food and water supplies. It raises the very real specter of human extinction if and when terrible “tipping points” like the large-scale release of Arctic methane (a potential near-term context for truly “runaway” warming) are passed. The related problem of ocean acidification (a change in the ocean’s chemistry resulting from excessive human carbon emissions) is attacking the very building blocks of life under the world’s great and polluted seas. Thanks to AGW and other forms of toxic human intervention in global ecology we most add drastically declining biodiversity – a technical phrase for the massive dying off of other species – to the list of “ecological rifts” facing humanity and other living and sentient beings in the 21stcentury.

The findings and judgments of the best contemporary earth science are crystal clear. As the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (UK) concluded last year: “Today, in 2013, we face an unavoidably radical future…We either continue with rising emissions and reap the radical repercussions of severe climate change, or we acknowledge that we have a choice and pursue radical emission reductions.” Sadly, however, the Tyndall scientists failed to radically confront the social-systemic cancer behind AGW. The deeper disease is capitalism, for whose masters and apologists the answer to the venerable popular demand for equality has long been “more.”[6]The answer is based on the theory that growth creates “a rising tide that lifts all boats” in ways that make us forget about the fact that a wealthy few are sailing luxuriantly in giant yachts while most of us are struggling to keep afloat in modest motorboats and rickety dinghies.

As Le Monde’s ecological editor Herve Kempf noted in his aptly titled book The Rich Are Destroying the Earth (2007), “the oligarchy” sees the pursuit of material growth as “the solution to the social crisis,” the “sole means of fighting poverty and unemployment,” and the “only means of getting societies to accept extreme inequalities without questioning them. . . . Growth,” Kempf explained, “would allow the overall level of wealth to arise and consequently improve the lot of the poor without — and this part is never spelled out [by the economic elite] — any need to modify the distribution of wealth.”

“Growth,” the liberal economist Henry Wallich explained (approvingly) in 1972, “is a substitute for equality of income. So long as there is growth there is hope, and that makes large income differentials tolerable.” ⁽¹⁾

But growth is more than an ideology and a promise to cover inequality under the profits system. It is also a material imperative for investors, managers, workers, and policymakers caught up in the disastrous competitive world-capitalist logic of what the Marxist environmental sociologist John Bellamy Foster calls “the global ‘treadmill of production.” Capitalism demands constant growth to meet the competitive accumulation requirements of capital, the employment needs of an ever-expanding global class or proletarians (workers dependent on wages), the sales needs of corporations, and governing officials’ need to legitimize their power by appearing to advance national economic development and security. This system can no more forego growth and survive than a person can stop breathing and live. It is, as the eco-socialist Joel Kovel notes, a system based on the “eternal expansion of the economic product,” and the “conver [sion of] everything possible [including the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil and plants] into monetary [exchange] value.”

“The Earth we live on,” Kovel notes, “is finite, and its ecosystems have evolved to accommodate to that finitude. Therefore, a system built on endless growth is going to destroy the integrity of the ecosystems upon which life depends for food, energy, and other resources.” [7]

Consistent with this harsh reality, the system’s leading investors have invested massively in highly wasteful advertising, marketing, packaging and built-in-obsolescence. The commitment has penetrated into core processes of capitalist production, so that millions toil the world over in the making of complex electronic (and other) products designed to lose material and social value (and thus to be dumped in landfills) in short periods of time.[8]

Along the way, U.S. capital has invested huge amounts of fixed capital in the existing fossil fuel-addicted energy system – “sunk” capital investments that make giant and powerful petrochemical corporations and utilities all too “rationally” (from a profit perspective) resistant to a much needed clean energy conversion. And there are more than enough fossil fuels left underground to push the planet past livability before carbon capital’s drillers and frackers run out – something to keep in mind in light of a recent report that methane released from melting permafrost has opened a gigantic crater in Siberia’s Yamal peninsula [9]. Talk about a “specter haunting Europe” (Marx and Engels, 1848) and indeed the whole world.

The same irrational systemic imperatives that drive capitalism into recurrent cycles of boom and bust turn the profits system into a cancerous threat to human existence. The extermination of the species is practically an “institutional imperative” (Noam Chomsky[10]) for the state-capitalist ruling class that imposes the lethal triumph of “exchange value” over “use value” (a key dichotomy in Marx’s analysis) atop the malignant rat-wheel of endless accumulation.

“The World’s Principal Long-Term Worry”

The Jacobin growth and equity advocate Piketty (he reports that high economic and demographic growth rates tend historically to reduce inequality) is not completely unconcerned with the problem. In a brief sub-section of his book, he writes the following: “The second important issue on which [capital accumulation] questions have a major impact is climate change and, more generally, the possibility of deterioration of humanity’s natural capital in the century ahead. If we take a global view then this is clearly the world’s principal long-term worry.” Piketty’s statement comes on page 567, like a tiny afterthought near the end of Capital in the 21st Century, in the volume’s mere three pages that focus on the leading specter haunting humanity in the 21st century, brought to us courtesy of capital. A “global view” would seem to be the view to take when it comes to planetary ecology, but “deterioration of natural capital” is econospeak for eco-cide.

According to the conservative Marxian Meghnad Desai more than a decade ago (in a book provocatively claiming that Marx would have predicted and welcomed the collapse of the Soviet Union), Marx felt that a real and viable socialism would only come after capitalism had exhausted its limits and was no “no longer capable of progress.”[10A] Whatever the accuracy of Desai’s claim regarding Marx (questionable since the mature Marx told Russian radicals they could skip the capitalist stage on the path to socialism), the ecological limits to “progress” under the profits system (private and/or state versions) were passed decades ago. It’s “[eco-] socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky” (Istvan Meszaros): a revolutionary red-green transcendence of continuing bourgeois class rule or a capitalist eco-apocalypse that is right out of Marx.

One can label this stark conclusion as a form dysfunctional “catastrophism” – a nasty term hurled by some Marxians (including the aforementioned Henwood[11]) at those who (like Chomsky) warn of the ever more imminent environmental….well, catastrophe. But to paraphrase and adapt Che Guevera, it’s not my fault if reality is now eco-socialist. “The Earth,” as the young Buddha was reported to have said, “is my [our] witness.”

“Capitalism is Awful but There is Nothing We Can Do About it”

The “catastrophist” matter of capital-o-genic eco-cide aside, what does the neo-Jacobin Piketty recommend in the way of solutions, so as to bring inequality back into the proper bourgeois-revolutionary boundaries of “common utility”? Proclaiming that that the standard liberal-domestic tax, spending and regulatory agenda is now ineffective in the face of capital’s planetary reach, he advocates a measure that is beyond the grasp of any currently existing national or international body: “a global tax on capital”– something Piketty candidly calls “a utopian idea” (Capital in the 21st Century, 515). Only such a worldwide levy “would contain the unlimited growth of global inequality of wealth,” Piketty writes.

Given the monumental logistical and political barriers to the implementation of such a tax, it’s hard not to see Piketty’s heralded Capital as feeding popular pessimism about the existence of any alternatives to the United States’ drift into what former New York State Tax Commissioner James Wezler calls “a plutocratic dystopia characterized by wealth inequality approaching that of ancien régime France.”[12] Piketty feeds the “de facto mental slavery” (David Barsamian[13]) of our time: the widespread sense of powerlessness and isolation shared by millions of citizens and workers and the intimately related idea that there’s no serious or viable replacement for – and nothing much that can be done about – the dominant order.

Given all this and more, including its oversized and tedious nature, why was Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Centurysuch a hit with relatively well-off, highly “educated” and supposedly “left”-leaning US liberals this last spring and summer? Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, got to the heart of the matter last May, at the peak of the Piketty craze. In an email to Columbia University journalism professor Thomas B. Edsall, Baker wrote that “a big part of the appeal is that it allows people to say capitalism is awful but there is nothing that we can do about it.” The author of a comprehensive domestic policy agenda for reducing inequality, Baker told Edsall “that many people will feel that they have done their part after struggling through a lengthy book on economics, and now they can go back to their vacation homes and say it’s all a shame.”[14]

It takes a lot more time and energy to read Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century than it does to vote for Barack Obama. Still, it’s hard to miss the parallel here. Like poking a ballot card for the first half-white US president, purchasing (and maybe even working their way through some or all of) Piketty’s book seems to help some liberals think they’ve made a contribution to solving the world’s injustices even while it asks them to do nothing of substance to fight inequality and justifies that nothingness by suggesting that nothing much can be done anyway.

Alternative Reading

For readers interested in deeper anti-capitalist substance and more than  Pikettyan powerlessness, there is no lack of first-rate writing on how to construct a radically transformed and democratized America Beyond Capitalism – title of an important book by the University of Maryland economist Gar Alperovitz. Alperovitz advocates giving workers and communities stakes and self-management through the expansion and support of significantly empowered employee stock ownership and other programs and policies (including highly progressive tax rates and a 25-hour work week) designed to replace the current top-down plutocracy with a bottom-up “pluralist commonwealth.”

Another “utopian” proposal is MIT engineering professor Seymour Melman’s call – developed in his 2001 book After Capitalism and other works—for a nonmarket system of workers’ self-management. Also important: left economist Rick Wolff’s Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism,combining a Marxian analysis of the current economic crisis with a call for “worker self-directed enterprises”; David Schweikert’s After Capitalism,calling for worker self-management combined with national ownership of underlying capital; Michael Liebowitz’s The Socialist Alternative,taking its cue from Latin America’s leftward politics to advance a vision of participatory and democratic socialism; Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of Nature (arguing that solving the current grave environmental crisis requires a shift away from private and corporate control of the planet’s resources); and Michael Albert’s prolific writing and speaking on behalf of participatory economics (“parecon”),inspired to some degree by the “council communism” once advocated by the libertarian Marxist Anton Pannekeok. In his book Parecon: Life After Capitalism (2003), Albert calls for a highly but flexibly structured model of radically democratic economics that organizes work and society around workers’ and consumers councils – richly participatory institutions that involve workers and the entire community in decisions on how resources are allocated, what to produce and how, and how income and work tasks are distributed.

More recently, a sprightly and highly readable Occupy-inspired volume published by a major US publishing house, HarperCollins, is titled IMAGINE Living in a Socialist America (2014). It includes essays from leading intellectuals and activists and provides practical reflections on how numerous spheres of American life and policy – ecology, workplace, finance/investment, criminal justice, gender, sexuality, immigration, welfare, food, housing, health care/medicine, education, art, science, media, and spirituality – might be experienced and transformed under an American version of democratic socialism.

Imagine the lively, inspirational, and forward-looking Imagine and not Piketty’s lumbering, backwards-looking, and pessimism-inducing Capital in the 21st Century (which offers little in the way of solutions and comes up very short on the problem) as the surprise bestseller of 2014. It’s not too late: order your copy here: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/imagine-frances-goldin/1115888725?ean=9780062305572.

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Author and historian Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (order at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=367810) Street is the author of “Part I: What’s Wrong with Capitalism?” in IMAGINE Living in a Socialist USA. 

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K%= Capitalists’ share of income; P%= People’s share; K/i= Capitalists’ per capita annual income; P/i= Ordinary citizen per capita annual income.

YEAR	GDP (MM)	K%	P%	K/i ($)	P/i ($)
1	1000	10	90	200,000	900
2	1500	15	85	450,000	1275
3	1850	18	82	660,000	1518
4	2100	23	77	966,000	1617
9	6700	78	22	10,452,000	1475
10	8300	78		12,948,000	1827
				6374% gain

Summation: Selected Endnotes 

1. “P”BS Newshour, May 12, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/piketty-takes-on-inequality-in-capital/

2. As Marx would certainly note with no small disdain. See Jack Rasmus, “Economists Discover Inequality But Have Yet to Explain It,” Jack Rasmus: Predicting the Global Economic Crisis (May 13, 2014), http://jackrasmus.com/2014/05/13/economists-discover-income-inequality-but-have-yet-to-explain-it/.

3. Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Berkeley, CA: Odonian Press, 1991), 91.

4. Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012), 82). For a brilliant left-anarchist historical perspective on the Soviet model (and the broader evolution of capitalist class relations in the workplace), see the formerly radical Stephen Marglin’s classic essay, “What do Bosses Do?,” pp. 13-54 in Andre Gorz, ed., The Division of Labor: The Labour Process and Class Struggle in Modern Capitalism (Humanities Press, NJ, 1976). The Soviet “model” was hardly without real accomplishments.  It succeeded in significantly modernizing Russia (the nation that more than any other defeated Hitler’s fascist regime) outside the pure Western capitalist model of privately owned means of production, distribution, transportation, finance, and communications. This was the main reason for U.S.-led Western hostility of the “Soviet specter,” not (following the doctrinal U.S. Cold War line) Russia’s alleged commitment to global revolution, something it abandoned with the exile of Trotsky in the 1920s. On Western/US Cold War complicity in the false description of the USSR as socialist, see Chomsky, Want Uncle Sam Really Wants, 92: “The world’s two major propaganda systems did not agree on much, but they did agree on using the term socialism to refer to the immediate destruction of every element of socialism by the Bolsheviks. That’s not too surprising. The Bolsheviks called their system socialist so as to exploit the moral prestige of socialism. The West adopted the same usage for the opposite reason: to defame the feared libertarian ideals [of workers’ control and true popular governance] by associating them with the Bolshevik dungeon, to undermine the popular belief that there really might be progress towards a more just society with democratic control over its basic institutions and concern for human needs and rights. If socialism is the tyranny of Lenin and Stalin, then sane people will say: not for me. And if that’s the only alternative to corporate state capitalism, then many will submit to its authoritarian structures as the only reasonable choice.”

5. Doug Henwood, “The Top of the World,” Book Forum, April/May 2014, http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_01/12987 It is interesting to compare this description of the Soviet model as proof that “an alternative system was possible” with Henwood’s dismissal of Mike Albert’s Parecon – the most elaborate attempt in recent post-Cold War times to develop a comprehensively non-and anti-capitalist economic vision (including non-hierarchical work relations) – as an unhelpful “off-the-shelf utopia.” See Doug Henwood, “A Post-Capitalist Future is Possible,” The Nation, March 13, 2009, http://www.thenation.com/article/post-capitalist-future-possible#. Parecon is a dysfunctional dreamland but the Soviet state-capitalist tyranny shows “that an alternative economic system was possible.”

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21215-beyond-growth-or-beyond-capitalism

http://clogic.eserver.org/3-1&2/foster.html; Joel Kovel, Chapter 2: “The Future Will be Ecosocialist Because Without Ecosocialism There Will be No Future,” in Francis Goldin, Debby Smith, and Michael Steven Smith, IMAGINE Living in a Socialist USA (New York: Harper Collins, 2014), 27-28.

8. John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Planetary Emergency,” Monthly Review (December 2013),http://monthlyreview.org/2012/12/01/the-planetary-emergency

http://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-siberian-crater-attributed-to-methane-1.15649

10. “I do not want to end without mentioning another externality that is dismissed in market systems: the fate of the species. Systemic risk in the financial system can be remedied by the taxpayer, but no one will come to the rescue if the environment is destroyed. That it must be destroyed is close to an institutional imperative.” Noam Chomsky, “Is t he World Too Big to Fail?” TomDispatch (August 20, 2012), www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175581/best_of_tomdispatch%3A_noam_chomsky,_who_owns_the_world_ On the permafrost crater in Siberia, see Nature (July 31, 2014), http://www.nature.com/news/mysterious-siberian-crater-attributed-to-methane-1.15649

10A. Meghnad Desai, Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of State Socialism (New York: Verso, 2002).

11. See the horrid ecological chapter by Eddie Yuen in Sasha Lilley, David McNally, James Davis, Eddie Yuen, and Doug Henwood, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth (PM Press, 2012). For a measured and brilliant response to Yuen, see Ian Angus, “The Myth of ‘Environmental Catastrophism,’” Monthly Review(September 1, 2013), http://monthlyreview.org/2013/09/01/myth-environmental-catastrophism/

12. Wezler is quoted in Thomas B. Edsall, “Thomas Piketty and His Critics,” New York Times, May 14, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/opinion/edsall-thomas-piketty-and-his-critics.html?_r=0

13. Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Interviews with David Barsamian (New York: Metropolitan, 2013), 34.

14. Edsall, “Piketty and his Critics.”

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WTF?

This time around Mr. & Mrs America may decide to stay home in droves.  (click to expand)

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Gaither Stewart
(Rome)

Still from All Quiet on The Western Front (1930), the classic film on the lost WWI generation based on E.M. Remarque’s novel and directed by Lewis Milestone left an enduring mark, but the ruling circles once again managed to launch another fratricidal war by 1939. (click to expand)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his morning as I begin piecing together ideas prompted by a reading of one of the best anti-war books ever written—Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet On the Western Front)—contemporary leaders of Europe of East and West are gathered in Milan three hundred miles north of Rome to discuss concepts of war and peace just as men have done since the ancient Greeks did while at the same time their armies were plundering their world. A few days later, a five-hour conference, One Hunded Years of War, took place at Bishop’s Gate in London

This year of 2014—one hundred years after the begin of WWI, “the war to end all wars”, began in Europe—is the proper time to refer back to the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet On the Western Front, an excellent framework to discuss the terrible dichotomy in man: his irresistible urge for war and death as opposed to his need for peace and life. I had read Remarque’s book as a young man in English; now I have just read it in the writer’s German language … of the country where I spent many years of my early adulthood and which language creates a very different atmosphere and mood than the version I remembered and transmits to me a clearer understanding of the writer’s intentions.

I was struck by the author’s constant use—every few pages it seems—of the German word Dasein, often translated into English as “existence”.  Dasein, or “being there”, or presence, is fundamental in existential philosophy to mean the whole experience of being of the human species: the awareness of our “being there” as well as the dilemma of living with our fellow human beings while aware that we are ultimately alone with ourselves.

Thus Dasein in that full sense of the word becomes an important theme of Remarque’s book: while it is emblematic of the opposing forces of war on the one hand and peace on the other, it reflects in the deepest sense individual man’s relationship with war, which is fear and death. In Remarque’s book only the soldier’s comradery, his love for his closest comrades without whose presence he returns to a state of solitude and alienation from life, keeps him alive. Yet when his comrades fall, his Dasein somehow continues.

The world goes around and everything comes back again. Human beings say and do the same things again and again. Man’s behavior and the ways of the world throughout history are truly inexplicable. Since the life of mankind is a chain of continuity, man’s unchanging behavior points us back to the ancient Greeks whose civilization was a major link in that chain. And what do we find there? We find the same warmongers and pacifists of today, identical war parties and peace parties, arms industries, the generals who predictably “just love war”, and, as one might expect, the same identical massacres of non-combatants as an everyday event in America’s wars, now conveniently called “collateral damage”, a military euphemism dating from the Vietnam War today so common that we nearly skip over those terrible words. Hopefully someday collateral damage will be called by its real name: “Crime against humanity”.

Paul in the bomb crater with his victim, enemy and soon to realize, brother. (Still from All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930)/ click to expand

Greek classics confirm that human beings are not as innovative as we like to think. A recent look at Greek ideas on power subsequently led me step by step to considerations of how power in the time of the Greeks of 2500 years ago led inevitably to war, just as it has for the last one hundred years. Ambition, power, wealth, influence, the urge for domination.

Euripides’ tragedy of 415 B.C. is considered by some critics as the greatest anti-war play ever written. That historical conclusion is truly astounding, considering the number of wars fought among the world’s major civilizations since those times. But, wait! Before going further I should situate this literary work in its proper framework: First of all—as do America’s wars today—it took place in “peacetime”, in the aftermath of the fall of Troy to the victorious Athenians. Centralizing Athens had just brutally sacked the island state of Melos to force it into the Greek Federation, much in the same fashion that centralizing USA undertakes its wars for “regime change” throughout the world. The Greek military action had shaken the people of Athens itself, as each new slaughter of civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan should stun us today. As was customary in those times most male citizens of Melos were massacred and women and children enslaved. At the same time the “peacetime” Greeks were preparing an unprovoked war against Sicily (read Syria and Iran for today), which in the long run however did not work out well, similar to America’s failure in Ukraine of 2014.

Actual German line. Appears to be freshly built and not yet exposed to actual combat, rain and mud. (click to expand)

Euripides’ tragedy reflected that then recent history. The play is set in Troy in the period between the fall of the city-state to Athens and the departure of the Greek fleet for home. The same thing had happened there as in Melos: the innocent civilians had suffered most. The Trojan men were slaughtered while the Trojan women were distributed among the victors. But as happens time and time again throughout history, the villains, the hated Athenian Odysseus, pretty, full-breasted Helen over whom the war was fought, and her former husband Menelaus, all survived. The focus in Euripides’ masterpiece is about the defeated Trojans. For a change the warlike Greeks are the bad guys.

Like Euripedes tragedy, Remarque’s novel is about the defeated, the Germans. Men of both sides fought the wars and suffered, but, as usual, the defeated suffered the most.

The Great War stimulated many artists, here a British rendition of the cost of war. (click to expand)

A primary element to compare and discuss is the hopelessness, uselessness and absurdity of war. In Euripides you see the hopeless despair of the women survivors in Troy: their fates as slaves and concubines of the victors. Remarque instead shows the hopelessness, the lostness, the solitude, the annihilation not only of individuals but of an entire generation of young men of eighteen to twenty years-old sacrificed for a war his characters do not understand. His was the first Lost Generation: the German soldiers of WWI. At one point, after the death and gore of his comrades, the terror and the tac tac tac of machine guns and the crash of grenades and shells, after the inferno of the trench warfare front, Remarque’s hero, Paul Bäumer thinks: “I see that peoples are driven one against the other and silently, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently kill (each other). I see that the smartest brains in the world invent weapons and words in order to make it more refined and long-lasting. And I and all people of my age, here and over there, in the whole world, and my generation experience the same.”

He ruminates: “For many years our activity was killing—it was our first profession in our Dasein. Our knowledge of life is reduced to death. What can happen afterwards? What will become of us?”

Likewise, today, one hundred years after Paul, our generation should recall the despondent Mothers of Mayo in Argentina during another kind of war, the Iraqi mothers and wives and daughters and their maimed and morally destroyed men folk. We can also recall the wives and mothers of American soldiers killed and maimed in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the broken lives of hundreds of thousands of America’s young men, many of whom are now abandoned on the desolate streets of the cities of America.

German trench, 1916 (click to expand)

The lack of compassion on the part of the Greek warriors recalls the same degeneration of humanity as seen in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and the unseen peoples, unknown and unnamed, under the bombs from stratospheric airplanes and unseen and unmanned drones. The inhumanity of war. So great was the savagery of the Greek victors too that even the gods Athena and Poseidon turned on them and destroyed many of their ships on the return voyage home.

Remarque describes a scene during the last days of the war when Germany knows it is defeated and soldiers are awaiting a peace declaration, an unopposed enemy airplane playfully chases one lone German soldier fleeing across open fields before, for entertainment, destroying him with a burst of machine gun fire.

Yet in Remarque, despite such individual displays of spite and savagery, the signs of comradery extend across the front lines from soldier to soldier who though they kill each other to survive even in hand-to-hand combat, they do not hate the enemy and even celebrate life together. “How senseless all that has ever been written, done or thought, when such is possible. It must be all lie and unimportant if the culture of thousands of years cannot prevent this stream of blood, that this jail of torture of hundreds of thousands can exist.”

A real German soldier of WWI. Note how boyish he looks.

The war rages on. Paul and his comrades cease to count the weeks they have spent fighting. Paul compares war to a deadly disease like the flu, tuberculosis, or cancer. The men’s thoughts are molded by “the changes of the days”: when they are fighting, their thoughts go dead; when they are resting, their thoughts are good. Their prewar lives are “no longer valid” since the years before they joined the army have ceased to mean anything. Before, they were “coins of different provinces”; now, they are “melted down,” and they all “bear the same stamp.” They identify themselves as soldiers first, only second as individual men. They share an intimate, close bond with one another, like that of convicts sentenced to death. Survival requires their complete, unquestioning loyalty to one another.

Paul talks to a dead soldier he has killed in hand-to-hand combat, explaining that he did not want to kill him. In the man’s pocketbook Paul finds a picture of a woman and a little girl. He reads what he can of the letters tucked inside. Every word plunges Paul deeper into guilt and pain. The dead man’s name is Gérard Duval, and he was a printer by trade. Paul copies his address and resolves to send money to his family anonymously. As dark falls again, Paul’s survival instinct reawakens. He knows that he will not fulfill his promise to the French soldier. He crawls back to his trench. Hours later, he confesses the experience of killing the printer to his comrades. They point out that he took no pleasure from his killing, that he had no choice; it was kill or be killed.

The tragedy written by the Athenian playwright is so pro-Trojan that it would cause not only bewilderment in a tongue-tied American mainline critic of America’ role in Afghanistan today, but also the destruction of his career. Only a pitiful small part of America feels sympathy for the defeated or even speaks of an undigested Vietnam. We can well wonder how long it will be before mainline culture discuses US guilt in Iraq or in Libya or today in Ukraine. How hard to pronounce ourselves pro-Afghan in this war.

One wonders why we are incapable of the same self-criticism Euripides was 2500 years ago. An uncomfortable truth for culture historians is that the world of the Greeks was upside-down. It was ruled by tragedy and ruthlessness and disregard for human lives; war and death and destruction reigned. Yet anyone who has read the classics knows that its men of culture, unlike their counterparts in the West today, resisted. The great Greek tragedies—of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus—were committed expressions of cultural freedom directed against power in all its forms. Though the Greeks were a male-dominated, martial society, the writers were the ethical conscience of mankind. Euripides’ message was that war scars the defeated and the victors alike. And not even post-bellum cleansing can remove the stain of blood and guilt.

Similarly, Remarque’s hero, Paul Bäumer, observes the Russian prisoners in a camp adjacent to a German recovery area and feels sympathy for them in near starvation. “The spirit of brotherhood among the prisoners touches Paul deeply. They live in such miserable circumstances that there is no longer any reason for them to fight among themselves. Paul cannot relate to them as individual men because he knows nothing of their lives; he only sees the animal suffering in them. People he has never met, people in positions of influence and power, said the word that made these men his enemy. Because of other men, he and they are required to shoot, maim, imprison, and kill one another. Paul pushes these thoughts away because they threaten his ability to maintain his composure. He breaks all of his cigarettes in half and gives them to the prisoners. One of the prisoners learns that Paul plays the piano. The prisoner plays his violin next to the fence. The music sounds thin and lonely in the night air, and only makes Paul feel sadder”

Euripides’ message was that war scars the defeated and the victors alike. And not even post-bellum cleansing can remove the stain of blood and guilt.

So who profits from the inhumanity of war? War profiteers are nothing new and should be recognizable for what they are. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the Chorus, standing at urns filled with the ashes of young men warriors (recalling the body bags and caskets bringing the dead back from America’s wars) recite: “For war’s a banker, flesh his gold.” Just as today, the makers of swords and spears and helmets and shields of the time censored all talk of peace. Generals like two-gun General Patton singing of the “joy of war” and “crazed for sweet human blood” sorrowed at the very mention of the word “peace” … at which ordinary people always rejoice.

Statistics of war dead are always misleading. In Greece, chiefly soldiers died. The women of Troy and Melos were enslaved. In Remarque’s WWI only the poorer civilians suffered privations of their creature comforts.

British trench at the Somme.

In our times, the great majority of dead are instead civilian, the collateral damage: in Vietnam, ninety per cent of the total dead were Vietnamese civilians as opposed to 59,000 American dead and its hundreds of thousands mutilated. In Iraq, probably ninety-nine per cent of the total dead are civilians.

At first also the Greek wars seemed glamorous and righteous and heroic … young men off in adventure to see the world. But those wars too ended in slaughter. Men and gods now know that America’s modern wars without winners, only losers, always hurt the innocent and pillage man.

Conquerors never conquer completely and the defeated are never defeated completely. Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Cuba and Nicaragua, to name a few, are the proof. But in the attempt, the innocent pay.

Most people know that the reasons for war are as absurd as is war itself. A gossipy (now metaphorical) aside about Helen of Troy recounts that the bloody ten-year Trojan War was over the bigamist and two-faced Helen, first Athenian as the wife of Menelaus, then Trojan as wife of Paris, then again Athenian, back in the arms of forgiving Menelaus. Helen, it was said, had great hair, bland manners, a cute little wart between her eyebrows, little mouth and perfect tits. Menelaus erupted into Troy to kill her for her marital betrayal but according to myth he only had to take one look at her bared breasts before he dropped his sword. In her life Helen apparently did little more than display her body … and betray. We do not know what she thought. Apparently, like war, she had no virtues. Most certainly she brought disaster to men and has been defined as “an irresistible sorrow”. Perhaps chastised by conscience but still a slave of her passions, Helen once referred to herself as “bitch that I am”—which describes clearly the reasons for war. She was the confirmation of Horace’s cutting words that even before Helen “the cunt (again metaphorically) was the cause of wars”.

Among the absurd causes of war stands up front patriotism, a most difficult obstacle for modern Americans. Today in America the opposite of patriotism has become disloyalty, anti-Americanism and betrayal. How difficult for Americans to be pro-Iraqi or pro-Afghan in public. The prominent Athenian opinion maker, Euripides, resolved the problem in this way: he was less against his Athens than opposed to all war makers. The purpose of his Trojan Women was apparently an attempt to shock and shake people to their senses as their leaders continued on their warlike path of conquest and the spread of their empire with the sword. The same dilemma goes for America today: for most certainly opposition to the wars, rejection of Washington’s Cold War-terrorist bugaboo, and convictions of a Washington-organized Twin Towers tragedy, are not unpatriotic principles.

Who in his right senses is not in accord with Euripides who screamed across Athenian stages 2500 years ago the same word pacifists cry today: “Enough!”

WWI: German assault. (click to expand)

Remarque’s hero’s reaction to the front strips the romanticism out of the war experience. Like the defenseless civilian today, the WWI soldier does not speak of the honor and glory of fighting or dying for one’s country; rather, he insists that the soldier fights for his life. He relies on instinct to save himself from bullets and bombs and concentrates on acquiring food, clothing, and shelter rather than on an abstract ideal of patriotic duty to the fatherland. Like civilians today, even small children, he learns to cope with constant fear, uncertainty, bombardment, and violence by regressing from his human sensitivities into a state of animalistic and instinctive self-preservation. Mother earth is often his salvation. Paul ruminates that for the soldier, the earth takes on a new significance at the front: he buries his body in it for shelter, and it receives him every time he throws himself down in a fold, furrow, or hollow. At the front, a man’s ancient animal instincts awaken. They are a saving grace for many men who obey those instincts without hesitation. When they reach the front they are instantly transformed from soldiers into “human animals.” Paul’s description of the soldier’s relationship with the earth—that mankind seems intent on destroying today—is full of sexual metaphors and imagery and alludes to the relationship between mother and child. The sexual imagery of “folds, and hollows, and holes” and men thrusting iron rods into the earth combined with the idea of the earth as mother suggest an Oedipal relationship between the soldier and earth. Although this Freudian interpretation is complicated by the fact that the earth is almost everything to the soldier—brother, friend, and mother—the sexual and maternal systems of imagery predominate.

Remarque’s soldiers, like many members of America’s lost generations, regard the war as something that could not possibly end because they cannot imagine anything else. They conceive their adult identities as inextricably linked to their lives as soldiers. One soldier has the most definite postwar plans, but even his answer involves remaining in the army—he cannot imagine himself as anything but a soldier. Paul and his younger comrades cannot imagine functioning in civilian jobs after what they have seen and done.

Their only definite plan for the future is to exact revenge upon those who worsened their condition.

They betray anxiety about the end of the war, as if they fear its end as much as they fear the war itself.

Thinking and planning for the future requires concrete forms of hope, but the horror of trench warfare doesn’t allow them to have hope for anything other than survival.

Remarque’s soldiers can do nothing but wait. Chance determines whether things will take a turn for the better or for the worse. Paul relates that he once left a dugout to visit friends in a different dugout. When he returned to the first, it had been completely demolished by a direct hit. He returned to the second only to discover that it had been buried.

Remarque’s WWI young soldiers like many Americans only know war. They have no experiences as adults that do not involve a day-to-day struggle to survive and maintain sanity. After inhaling poison gas, Paul is given fourteen days of leave to recuperate. A wave of intense desire to return home seizes him, but he is frightened because he has no goals; were he to return home, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself. He fears that his generation will yield no survivors—that they will return home as living corpses, shells of human beings. Fears pertinent to US soldiers today; another collateral effect. Paul cannot bear the thought. Something that is essentially human in them must survive the years of bombardment, but he feels that his own life has been irrevocably destroyed. This rings like also Palestinians under ceaseless Israeli fire or Pakistani under American drone fire must feel.

The autumn of 1918, after the bloodiest summer in Paul’s wartime experience, Paul is the only surviving member of his original group of classmates. The war continues to rage, but now that the United States has joined the Allies, Germany’s defeat is only a matter of time.

In light of the extreme privations suffered by both the German soldiers and the German people—as was happening in revolutionary Russia—it seems likely that if the war does not end soon, the German people will revolt against their leaders.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Fifth Sun.  His widely acclaimed espionage novels, The Trojan Spy and Lily Pad Roll, focusing on America’s stealth efforts to encircle and dismember Russia, are part of the Europe Trilogy, to be completed in 2015 with the third volume, Time of Exile, currently in preparation by Punto Press. 

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By Federico Fuentes
AS SEEN ON COUNTERCURRENTS
TeleSUR English

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]redictions by pollsters and commentators that Evo Morales would easily win Bolivia’s October 12 presidential elections were confirmed when the incumbent obtained over 60% of the vote.

Most however differ over why, after almost a decade in power, Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) continues to command such a huge level of support.

Their explanations tend to focus on specific economic or political factors, such as booming raw material prices or the MAS’s ability to control and co-opt the country’s social movements.

However, to understand why Morales will soon become the longest serving head of state in a country renowned for its history of coups and rebellions, it is necessary to start with an acknowledgement of the profound changes that Bolivia has undergone during his presidency.

Economic transformation

For some, the old saying “it’s the economy, stupid” neatly summed up the reasons for Evo’s victory.

They argue Morales simply rode the wave of high commodity prices, or promoted the ongoing expansion of lucrative extractivist industries, irrespective of social or environment costs, in order to use these funds to boost his popularity.

Yet, these views ignore (or purposely conceal) a basic truth, namely that Bolivia’s economic success is a direct result of the MAS government’s program for economic transformation.

This program has focused on weakening transnational control over the local economy and diversifying the economy away from its position of dependency on raw material exports.  A key plank of this program was Morales’ 2006 decree nationalizing the all-important gas sector.

Support for Morales is actually a result of the economic transformation that has taken place in Bolivia.

Without this move, any increased windfall from higher commodity prices would have inevitably flowed out of the country, as it had under previous governments.

President Morales holding a coca leaf. The plant has received a bad rap, he says. Few leaders can match his record of original and productive governance. His agenda, reflecting the vision of indigenous peoples, is by far the most ecologically and philosophically advanced in the entire world. (click to expand)

Instead, the capture and dramatic internal redistribution of Bolivia’s gas wealth helped fuel a huge surge in domestic demand, as ordinary people were lifted out of poverty and finally able to attend to their basic needs.

In fact, Bolivia’s record growth rates had more to do with a booming internal market than with external demand, which actually had a negative affect on growth during the global economic crisis.

Increased revenue derived from nationalization also enabled the Morales government to take steps towards making the local economy less dependent on raw material exports.

The government launched its industrialization program, which will soon see Bolivia go from a position of importing processed gas to exporting liquefied petroleum gas and other derivatives (for much higher returns).  Furthermore, the redistribution of gas revenue to other productive sectors has facilitated growth in non-extractive based industries.

This is particularly true for those sectors that provide livelihoods for a majority of the MAS’s social base, which is largely comprised of small-scale farmers, cooperative miners, street vendors and those employed in family businesses or micro-enterprises.

Economic diversification has also meant that growth in manufacturing outpaced both the mining and gas sectors last year.

The idea that Morales’ success is the result of external or internal economic factors such as high commodity prices or dependence on existing extractive industries is as simple as it is wrong.

The truth is that support for Morales is actually a result of the economic transformation that has taken place in Bolivia.

Political revolution

Many analyses also ignore the critical role that Bolivia’s indigenous and social movements have played in revolutionizing the country’s political set-up.

While the nationalization of Bolivia’s gas was officially decreed by the Morales government, it was in fact the direct result of years of struggle by the Bolivian people.

At the heart of these struggles was the demand to nationalize the gas in order to redirect this wealth towards meeting peoples’ needs.

Unsurprisingly, opinions differ as to what exactly should be done with this wealth.

Given the highly organized and mobilized nature of Bolivia’s popular classes, these differences have often been contested in the streets. As a result, the second Morales government (2009-2014) witnessed the highest rate of protests for any government in Bolivian history.

Only a tiny minority of these protests focused on issues to do with resource extraction.

The overwhelming bulk revolved around disputes over resource redistribution. This includes protests over access to basic services through to the redistribution of electoral boundaries and concurrent changes in funding allocation, and mobilizations against particular economic measures (for example, attempts to clamp down on contraband or impose taxes on cooperative miners).

The record number of protests would seem to go against the idea that the MAS has successfully co-opted Bolivia’s social movements. Yet, it also begs the question: if the Bolivian population is staging more protests than ever, why does Morales continue to maintain his popularity?

The explanation lies in the fact that Morales’ election heralded much more than the arrival of the first indigenous person to the presidential palace. It marked the onset of a political revolution that has gradually seen Bolivia’s old political elites dislodged from power and replaced by representatives from the country’s indigenous peoples and popular classes.

For this majority, the MAS government represents a safeguard against a return to the Bolivia of yesteryear, run by corrupt, white elites. More than that, for most indigenous people and social movements, the MAS government is “their” government.

This does not mean that the people have handed the MAS a blank check. Already on several occasions the MAS government has been forced to back down on certain policies due to popular pressure.

However, none of these protests have posed a fundamental challenge to the MAS’s overall vision for Bolivia, precisely because this vision is largely informed by the struggles and demands of the people themselves.

Instead, these conflicts have primarily been disputes over how best to make this vision a reality.

The MAS’s response to date has been to follow an approach of seeking dialogue and consensus, retreating where necessary but always attempting to continue to drive the process forward towards its goal.

Morales constantly sums up this approach using the Zapatista slogan “to govern by obeying”.

It was this approach that enabled the MAS to come into the elections with the backing of all of the country’s main indigenous, campesino, worker and urban poor organizations and to ensure its thumping victory.

The failure of opposition forces and critics to recognize or accept the fact that a political revolution has taken place and important economic transformations are underway explains why they are so far out of touch with the majority of Bolivian society.

Bolivia’s process of change is far from complete, and it may yet falter. It may also be dramatically impacted by events in the region, for example a change of government in neighboring Brazil.

For now, however, Bolivians have once again overwhelmingly chosen to push forward with their process of change.

[Federico Fuentes is co-author, together with Roger Burbach and Michael Fox, he is the co-author of Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Socialism (Zed Books 2013).]

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