CLASS ANALYSIS

John J. Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and Co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, assesses the causes of the present Ukraine crisis, the best way to end it, and its consequences for all of the main actors. A key assumption is that in order to come up with the optimum plan for ending the crisis, it is essential to know what caused the crisis. Regarding the all-important question of causes, the key issue is whether Russia or the West bears primary responsibility.

CHRIS HEDGES—The belief that the Democratic Party offers an alternative to militarism is, as Samuel Johnson said, the triumph of hope over experience. The disputes with Republicans are largely political theater, often centered around the absurd or the trivial. On the substantive issues there is no difference within the ruling class. The Democrats, like the Republicans, embrace the fantasy that, even as the country stands on the brink of insolvency, a war industry that has orchestrated debacle after debacle, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, is going to restore lost American global hegemony. Empires, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, eventually “destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible.” The self-delusion of military invincibility is the scourge that brought down the American empire, as it brought down past empires. 

EDWARD J CURTIN—Despite a treasure trove of new research and information having emerged over the last fifty-seven years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable questions. They have drunk what Dr. Martin Schotz has called “the waters of uncertainty” that results “in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.” 

Then there are others who cling to the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission. 

PAUL EDWARDS—Under Hitler, Nazis became, as was promised, more repressive, politically punishing, and viciously racist, murdering leadership of the parties that had opposed them, the Communists—who had gotten nearly as many votes—and Social Democrats.  With those parties decapitated, organized resistance ceased in a nation divided between a minority supporting Hitler and everyone else.

Each episode of the series will discuss one important topic of Marxist political economy. This video discusses the first class society: and the slave mode of production.

The video covers the following topics: -Rise of slavery -Rise of the state (and armies) -Rise of classes (slaves vs owners + peasants, handicraftsmen, lumpen) -Separation of cities and countryside -Division of labor: –Separation of handicraft from agriculture –Separation of banking and merchants from producers -Rise of science, philosophy etc. -Fall of the slave-owning mode of production