Navigating the Intricacies of Habermas

Michael Welton

Light streaming through a dark forest

The Habermas corpus is vast, like a dark forest with light streaming through, illuminating various pathways. If we take account into account his tremendous output and the seemingly endless secondary works (books and journal articles extending to the heavens), one easily feels overwhelmed.

Habermas’s work is not easy to grasp because he criss-crosses many disciplines and has precipitated influential scholarly thinking in so many different domains of thought (theology, health, education, humanities and social sciences, international relations, philosophy and law). And his language is often dense, some might even say convoluted. If you are unschooled in German Idealist thought, one can very quickly get tangled up in a net of abstruse concepts such as Fichte’s non-ego. His ideas are also constantly evolving in dialogue with others. Yet at its heart lies a simple intuition. Our ability to use language contains the secrets of our freedom.

Jurgen Habermas is the world’s leading philosopher. Born in 1929, he grew up in the Nazi regime, like so many of his generation (like Ralf Dahrendorf and Gunter Grass), joined the Hitler Youth. After completing his doctorate on Schelling, Habermas came to Adorno’s attention and arrived there expectantly in 1956. While at the Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School), he wrote brilliant essays on Marx and notions of political participation. But, surprising as this may seem, Habermas’s Habilitationsschrift (to gain the rank of Professor in Germany, one needs to do what we would call a “second doctorate”) was rejected by Max Horkheimer. Habermas left the Institute and submitted the dissertation to Wolfgang Abendroth at Marburg University. The rejected text was later published in English in 1989 as The structural transformation of the public sphere.

Although deeply influenced by the great Frankfurt critical theorists, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, he could not accept their pessimistic conclusion that “reason” had been consumed in the flames of the holocaust, and that reason, which held out such promise to “liberate” humankind, had turned into its very opposite—an instrument that sought to exercise control and domination over things and people. Habermas knew bitterly that instrumental reason sought the most efficient means to achieve the evil end of eliminating Jews. Even to this day he refuses to condemn severely the state of Israel’s actions against the Palestinians. This troubles me, but one can understand to some extent the deep wound in the German soul. Although this was a uniquely dark moment in European history, Habermas refused to identify reason with its historic instrumental use in the Nazi period. Human beings could learn lessons from catastrophe; the desire to make sense together—to communicate with each other, to understand what our lives mean, and how we ought to proceed-was irrepressible and ineradicable.

Spirit of engagement

Habermas’s scholarly practice is characterized by a deep respect for his “dialogue partners.” He has embodied the spirit of engagement, openness, and humility so often lacking in our public talk and parliamentary discourse these days. He has been a great “hermeneuticist” in dialogue with Foucault, Derrida, Rawls or Rory and numerous others. His “replies to his critics” could be gathered into many volumes.

Habermas insists that “critical theory” can be used by individuals and collectives for liberation from various forms of domination. But in the quest for enlightenment, there are only participants. Critical theory of various types can provide a repertoire of explanations, understandings, and axioms that actors can draw upon in their moral and ethical decision-making. It cannot legislate the way to live well. Nor can it provide comfort in our loneliness, suffering or alienation. Those resources still reside primarily in the semantic potentials of religious experience and cultic life. Habermas claims he is “religiously unmusical.” But he can deliver a commemoration speech on the great Jewish scholar of the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, where he seems have the insider’s view, to have read and understood his
mystical texts. He knows his Kantian philosophy of religion backwards and forwards; and knows what is at stake theologically and humanly when he reads Schleiemacher and Kierkegaard. Does it strike you as odd to see a photograph of Habermas and Pope Benedict conversing on a sofa?

Habermas has also demonstrated great courage as an intellectual. He has refused the pessimism of his old Frankfurt teachers on one side, and generalized despair on the other. He raised crucial questions to the German New Left of the 1960s and paid dearly for this. In our disenchanted times, Habermas has persisted in articulating a view of democracy that challenges both the cynicism of contemporary political theorizing and the utopian dream, of creating a totally new world (or one completely governed by communicative action). Habermas combines a restrained utopianism with a realistic sense of our contemporary predicament and possibilities as we enter the second decade of the dreadful twenty-first century.

He does not think that “modernity” should be condemned wholesale and outright. He is very skeptical of the “rage against reason” currently so fashionable in the Academy. As well, he has been active through the years as a “public intellectual”, engaging in many disputations—from the disputation with the “German historians” who tried to revise their history so as to skirt responsibility for the holocaust to his facing-off with grumbling theologians who don’t fancy this fox wandering in their henhouse asking hard questions about what faith can mean in a post-metaphysical world or how secular and religious citizens can translate their ideas into publicly accessible language. Habermas adamantly rejects the daft ideas offered by journalists who think that we face the choice of either confining religion to its private places or watching religion fight for domination over everyone else in the public sphere. Like Schleiemacher (who wrote On religion: addresses to its educated despisers in 1799), Habermas has the guts to critique contemporary despisers who desire its demolition.

From his student days, Habermas has tried to find the solid ground, a way to defend the idea that we can rationally justify universal normative claims. Habermas did not think that Marx had succeeded in this task. Nor did he believe that the idea of the proletariat as an emancipatory collective subject still carried deep and profound motivating power in our post-World I societies. To provide this solid ground, Habermas has pursued vigorously this daunting project by re-working historical materialism as a social evolutionary learning theory, analyzing the fundamental knowledge-interests of our species, developing the philosophical basis for communicative action and devising a theory of society anchored in the different modes of rationality (instrumental, communicative and emancipatory). In his most recent works, Habermas has extended his communicative theory into profound reflections on terrorism, religion and public life, genetics and human nature, and the future of Europe. In a nutshell, he is alarmed at the shredding of the conversable world and the global failure to press to the fulfilment of Kant’s great dream of a peaceful, post-national constellation governed by law and bound resolutely to human solidarity.

To engage the world pre-scientifically

In his early controversial text, Knowledge and human interests(1972), Habermas believed that he could ground a revitalized critical theory for our time in our species’ basic cognitive orientations. To be “deeply human” was to engage the world pre-scientifically in inescapable ways. We were creatures thrown into nature and into association with other beings who had the capacity to understand us. We were creatures who had ineradicable interests in gaining partial mastery over the natural world (through social labour) as well as communicating with each other to establish values, norms and procedures to live with one another in a world full of meaning. We were also creatures who have the intellectual and spiritual capacity to recognize when communication is distorted or coerced. Indeed, Habermas boldly asserted that our first speech utterance presupposed an ideal speech situation of unconstrained understanding. These interests—the technical, the practical and the emancipatory—were fundamental learning relationships; we couldn’t escape from them.

Habermas understands the communicative framework within a dualistic framework—the system and the lifeworld. This is the axial conceptual distinction for making sense of Habermas’s social learning theory. The lifeworld is the taken for granted universe of daily social activity. It consists of knowledge, traditions, and customs that are passed down through generations. In the course of social evolution (see Communication and the evolution of society [1979]) the lifeworld becomes opened up gradually to reflective learning processes. The lifeworld is the realm where humans learn what life means, what binds them together, and what is needed to act as a competent person in the world. Expressed schematically, actions in the lifeworld are communicatively coordinated. In contrast, the system consists of the structural features of life governed by non-linguistic media. Habermas argues that the system is made up of two units—the economy and the state. He uses “money” as the signifier for the economy and “power” as the signifier of the state. He develops these ideas in two fat books,Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987).

Thus, the sub-systems of economy and state do not co-ordinate our actions through communicative action. Our actions as workers and citizens are coordinated, fundamentally, without our consent and participation in decision-making. The market and administrative systems operate behind our backs as it were. Of course, those who are running (or is it “ruining”?) the economy or the state apparatus talk and argue with one another (with the occasional turn of the ear to muted voices of the exploited). But their talk takes for granted ends that are seldom questioned (the money code constrains the talk within the economic realm, and the power code constrains talk within the administrative systems).

We can debate how much communicative space might be cracked open within system realms. Habermas argues that civil society (the lifeworld expressed in associational and institutional form) requires communicative interaction oriented to understanding for its reproduction. Habermas’s decisive argument is that relationships within civil society are not governed by an instrumental logic. Of course one could now consider how the system realm could colonize the lifeworld, introducing distorting dynamics into the communication process. Habermas’s accentuation of civil society as the preeminent learning domain staked out a controversial theoretical and political position. Those thinkers who gave precedence to overturning the capitalist economy accused Habermas and his followers of acceding to capitalism and adopting a reformist approach to social change. Thus, orthodox Marxist critics of civil societarians argued that until the economy was socialized, all talk of a vital and exuberant civil society replete with emancipatory potential was futile talk. And feminists have queried idealized versions of civil society that assume that it is a nice place, far removed from the nastiness of violence, sexism and racism.

Indeed, voluntary organizations can engage in disturbingly oppressive practices free from any monitoring attuned to universal principles. As I look at what I have written on civil society and social movements, I would say that I have downplayed the nefarious role that a NGO like The National Endowment for Democracy has played in a country like the Ukraine, where it forsook any commitment to forming critically alert citizens and engaged in activities oriented to overthrowing the government and precipitating war against Russia. Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan or Al-Qaeda also occupy the terrain of “civil society,” and they definitely fall into the category of “bad civil society.” Nonetheless, Habermas’s identification of civil society as the primary site of resistance and emancipation, targeting of social movements as exemplary actors, naming of the public sphere as the salient arenas of action and deliberation as fundamental social learning processes caught the imagination of activists and theorists alike.

Core values for critical adult education practice

I consider myself a critical adult educator. The core value structure of adult education—our affirmation that the lifeworld is the foundation of meaning, social solidarity and stable personality, our commitment to the enlightened, autonomous and reflective learner and to the centrality of social learning processes to the formation of the active citizen, and to the fostering of discussion, debate and dialogue among divergent views—leads us straight to the civil society camp. It is the natural home, I would argue insistently, of critical adult educators and movements for social transformation.

Civil society is the privileged domain for non-instrumental learning processes. It is here, within the network of family, school, association, movement and public life, that citizens are able to raise issues or topics requiring public attention and system-action. Here, for example, associations like trade unions (which bridge the lifeworld and the system) can raise pertinent issues pertaining to the exploitation and oppression within the workplace. Left to their own logic and devices, neither economic nor administrative systems are hospitable to learning new ways of seeing and being. The risks of genetic engineering, ecological threats, global warming, feminism’s plethora of themes, skyrocketing impoverishment of the Third World, the HIV/Aids epidemic in Africa and the madness manifest in world leader’s decisions—these (and other) issues swirl out of learning conversations of radical intellectuals, ordinary suffering citizens and citizen advocates and organizations. The general tendency, therefore, is for learning conversations (with the social media creating endless learning space) to crystallize into publicly persuasive formulations. The huge difficulty an awakened and mobilized civil society faces is how to ensure that these demands migrate into the system realms for attention and action. Thus, there must be fluid gateways constructed between civil society, the economy and the state.

Several axioms pertinent to critical adult education emerge through our engagement with the discourse (and practices) within civil society. Filtered through the learning lens, civil society can be revisioned as society’s essential learning infrastructure. From here, we can then make the following observations. First, it is within the realm of civil society that social capital is produced. Concepts like physical and human capital are well known, social capital less so. Social capital refers to the way the dynamics of associational life produce norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness. We form connections to benefit our own interests (networking or jobs). But social capital also affects the wider community—a well-connected community permits individuals to accrue benefits. Social capital is clearly both a “private good” and a “public good.” Service clubs, for instance, produce friendships and business connections while mobilizing resources to fight disease. If relations of trust and reciprocity are damaged or only thinly present, persons will not be open to each other. Indeed, they may look out for number-one and exclude any willingness to walk down a conversational road.

Second, the scope and vitality of a society’s associational is prerequisite for building a deliberative democracy. We learn to be citizens not by participating in politics first, but in the “free spaces” of school, church, 4-H clubs, and YWCA. Associations carry considerable potential to create opportunities for people to learn to respect and trust others, fulfil social obligations and how to press one’s claims communicatively. Tyrannical and oppressive states understand the potential of civil society associations. They will inevitably move to create elaborate surveillance mechanisms (spies in coffee shops and in etherspace) to spy on citizens and prevent learning from crystallizing into outright opposition.

Third, the new social movements are an integral, if disruptive, part of the civil society infrastructure in late modern societies. New social movements are not perfect place; they are flawed, human, and contentious. However, the movement’s task is to produce a broad shift in public opinion; to alter the parameters of organized will-formation, and to exert pressure on parliaments, courts and administrations in favour of specific policies. Movements may also act defensively to maintain the existing structure of associations and public influence. Certainly there are social movements—like religious fundamentalism—that occupy the terrain of civil society and compete to undermine other’s conceptions of the good or vital democracy. Here, the state’s role is to ensure that rules of tolerance and respect for the other’s viewpoint are adhered to. The new social movements (such as the women’s, peace, and ecology movements) are salient learning spaces within modern societies. They raise issues relevant to the entire society, define new ways approaching problems, propose solutions, supply new information, offer different interpretations of prevalent values, and mobilize good reasons while criticizing bad ones. An awakened civil society may strike fear in the hard hearts of the state. In Canada, PM Harper has made moves in a series of recent bills to make protest against, say, pipelines, illegal. Fear and cynicism make a poisonous cocktail.

Fourth, the creation and maintenance of exuberant public spheres is central to civil societarian adult education. Certainly, the new social movements often serve as public spaces creating learning opportunities (through forums, etc.). But in late modern societies, the public sphere is substantively differentiated. Following Habermas (Between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy [1996]), we can talk of popular science and literary publics, religious and artistic publics, feminist and “alternative” publics and publics concerned with health issues, social welfare or environmental policy. We can also differentiate publics in terms of density of communication, organizational complexity and the spatial range.

The media—the complex of information-processors and image creators—play an enormously powerful role in influencing how we see the world. The evidence of the power of the corporate mass media—with its incredible ability to invent false truths to sustain American Imperial power against Russia—shocks us out of lethargy. How do we create an enlightened public who have the capacity to break through the fog of propaganda that envelops us? The central question for civil societarian adult educators and social activists is this: who can place issues on the agenda and determine what direction the lines of communication take?

Despite many troubles, the discourse on civil society and public sphere in the contemporary social sciences and humanities is richly suggestive for adult learning theorists and practicing popular educators who are designing intervention strategies for a just and honest learning society.

Trickle-Down Democracy

JOHN K. WHITE

Whether the restrictive policies of Lord North or the madness of King George III lost the American colonies, if George Washington had had a son, the new American republic would likely have become a monarchy, and almost five percent of the world’s population would now be living in the biggest monarchy in the world, the United Kingdom of America. More than two centuries on, one has to wonder: Is it Crown Prince Jeb versus Queen Hillary for prez now, with their eye-popping war chests?

Many a proud establishment boasts its heritage with a Proprietor and Son sign above the door. Lawyers beget lawyers, actors create actors, and sons follow their fathers into the butcher’s business, but one wouldn’t think that a name matters in a democracy, all things being created equal and all.

And yet, family democracies have seemingly become more common, not just the Adams, Roosevelts, or Dalys, but today’s Browns, Kennedys, Bushes, and Clintons, the devils we know preferred to the devils we don’t. Even one-fifth of all women who served in the United States Senate succeeded their late husbands, including the first ever woman senator in 1931, Hattie Caraway of Arkansas.

Until recently in Greece, the so-called cradle of democracy, the Papandreous dynasty had perfected an almost perpetual relationship with an undiscerning polis (father, son, and grandson), whereas in Ireland, Daniel McConnell noted that “Children following in their parents’ footsteps has been a hallmark of our electoral system” (The Sunday Independent, December 27, 2009). Indeed, 49 percent of national Irish parliamentarians were either related to current or past members in a recent parliament. Argentina has seen two sets of husband and wife presidents (Juan Perón/Isabel Martínez, Néstor Kirchner/Cristina Fernández), while in India and Pakistan, family democracies have ruled for much of their histories (Nehru/Gandhi, Zardari/Bhutto). Hardly representative government.

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote that, “the legislative part … are supposed to have the same concerns at stake which those who appointed them, and who will act in the same manner as the whole body would act were they present.” Paine and other early patriots were believers in representative government. Further on, he warns of the evils of monarchy: “One of the strongest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings, is, that nature disapproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule by giving mankind an ass for a lion. Indeed, “Who’s your daddy?” is no prerequisite for democracy. As Paine succinctly noted, “virtue is not hereditary.”

So on to Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, the presumed son-brother and wife contenders. We can’t really prefer a top-down ordering of society from one anointed neo-king to another, by blood and connection, rather than a tried-and-true, bottom-up representative of the masses. I thought we’d learned our lessons in war after war. What’s next—Caligula’s horse?

Sometimes the point is made though about the dangers of inherited thought, as when New York congressman Gary Ackerman commented on Caroline Kennedy’s grab at Hillary Clinton’s vacated senatorial spot, “I don’t know what Caroline Kennedy’s qualifications are. Except that she has name recognition, but so does J-Lo.” In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy suffered a similar fate, when his son was forced to remove his lofty hat from the running to be head of a €100-million-a-year public agency.

The parchment may state that we are all created equal, but there seems to be a different version going around today, one overseen by a closed thinking shop. Of course, conservative politicians are fond of championing the occasional upstart that appears from the sidelines to show the strength of their dogged perseverance, as in an always happy-ending Hallmark Hollywood movie. Margaret Thatcher often commented on her shopkeeper’s daughter upbringing, and even B-movie stars or weightlifters make it to the top of the political food chain now and again.

It’s not just name recognition that counts these days. One also needs a rather large war chest to get elected, where more than $7 billion was spent on the 2012 American presidential campaign, up from $2 billion the previous election. In his bid for New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg spent $73 million of his own wealth (five times that of his rivals) and in the California gubernatorial race to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger, billionaire former ebay CEO, Meg Whitman, spent $81 million of her own money just on the primary. Indeed, the political and social divide is now firmly defined by money. Lots of it.

According to Forbes, the 100 richest people in the world have a whopping $2.3 trillion and are mostly American, including 7 of the richest 10. Family wealth is evident with the Koch brothers tied for sixth ($86 billion) and four of the Walton family in the top 12 (Christy, Jim, Alice, and S. Robson with $161 billion). Half of all American wealth is also inherited, perhaps not surprising since money has been at the centre of the American Dream since its inception. Kurt Vonnegut elegantly restated this notion from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 Democracy in America: “Want a taste of that great book? [de Tocqueville] says, and he said it 169 years ago, that in no country other than ours has love of money taken a stronger hold on the affections of men.” Indeed, money, power, and connections, the soul of today’s democracies, not morality, passion, and convictions.

Inequality is one thing, but donor democracy and buying elections is another. Nicholas Confessore noted that the Koch brothers and their political network are planning to spend close to $900 million on the next presidential election (New York Times, January 26, 2015), having already spent considerably in the last election cycle, perhaps the decisive factor in the recent Republican Senate takeover. Politics is big business, and to the victors go the spoils with an agenda of corporate interests and old-fashioned quid pro quo, fashioned after the likes of Andrew Jackson who ran his administration on a “spoils” system.

Is it all failed trickle-down thinking? William Jennings Bryan, the three-time American presidential candidate, perhaps better known for his religious views in the Scopes monkey trial, his attempts to wean the United States from gold to silver, and the creation of the Federal Reserve, is credited with coining the “trickle-down” moniker, stating that “if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through to those below.” John Kenneth Galbraith aptly characterized the mechanism behind the real workings: “The less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.” Father to son, husband to wife.

Social Darwinism, the failed pseudo-scientific belief that wealth and material advancement is the measure of one’s success as if “naturally selected,” continues as the standard bearer of American enlightenment despite its obvious shortcomings, when redressing the imbalance created by a business-first world is needed if we want to live in a more human-based egalitarian society that attempts to solve the problems of our times and our shared existence. A government of the people, by the people, for the people? Sadly, more like one man, one billion dollars, one million votes. Trickle-down thinking and trickle-down democracy is a step into a failed past of family cliques and failed self-interested policies.

At least we’re guaranteed an all-woman race around 2040, given the strengths of Brands Bush and Clinton, when Barbara (and/or Jenna) and Chelsea should be readying their test of the electoral waters. Yes, it’s high time for a female president, but imagine the political fireworks had our past monarchs, Messrs Washington, Clinton, and Bush sired boys. Behold the United Kingdom of Great America.

The Baltic States and Greece: Divergent Crises

Jeffrey Sommers

It has become increasingly fashionable to compare the results of Greece and the Baltic States’ response to the financial crisis of 2008, most recently last month with the Financial Times’ column with John Dizard. This, however, is a classic textbook case of comparing apples to oranges. Greece’s crisis was chiefly a public debt crisis enabled by membership in the eurozone and the cheap loans extended to the state this enabled that amounted to 107.4 percent of GDP in 2007 in the run up to the crisis. By contrast, the Baltic states had paltry public debt to GDP ratios of only 4.4, 10.7, 18 percent respectively in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 2007, before the financial shock. Their crisis was a private sector one as banking capital ran for the door after creating a property bubble that burst.

Greece and the Baltic states did share one common feature. Tax evasion has been the national sport in their respective countries. For the Baltics states (especially Latvia) and their offshore banks, this is big business which their economies depend on. The Syriza government in Greece is attempting to tackle this pernicious problem, albeit with unknowable results at present.

Additionally, there was a wide gap in wages between Greece and the Baltic states following the crisis. For example, in 2009 Latvia’s per capita purchasing power (PPP) was $14,307 (in 2013 adjusted dollars). By contrast that year in Greece it was $29,512. Thus, given the ultra-low wages paid in the Baltics, there was much incentive for investors to take advantage of wage arbitrage opportunities. The real wage gaps were larger still, given that Baltic inequality is more extreme than in Greece. Now that wages have increased in the Baltic states to levels close to Greece’s, economic growth is flatlining as the wage arbitrage between them and Greece is no longer significant.

Oil prices rebounded quickly after the 2008 shock and by 2009 CIS offshore cash was racing into the Baltics from the east. More still came in as problems emerged in Cyprus’ offshore banking industry in 2012 and 2013. Now that oil prices have declined offshore financial flows to the Baltics have declined and with that (and the EU sanctions against Russia) their economic growth has dramatically slowed. So the

jury is still out on the longer-term economic consequences of the kind of brutal austerity that Greece and the Baltics share in common.

Furthermore, the Baltics did not cut taxes in response to the crisis. In fact, they introduced tax increases on the poorer sections of the population to repair their balance sheets. Immediately following the crisis, Latvia for example increased its VAT on many items (but not luxury goods). Some have praised the relatively flat tax rates of the Baltic states, but this doesn’t take into account the non-taxable minimum was cut dramatically in 2009, and represented the equivalent of a 7% tax increase on the bottom third of Latvians. In short, Baltic state taxes have been anything but flat, but have been regressive.

Meanwhile, the Baltic states have experienced new levels of mass poverty (40% of Latvia’s children were at risk of poverty in 2009). The results have been an exodus of the population with the highest levels of out-migration in the EU that threatens the longer-term sustainability of even the very partial recovery that has occurred. Also at risk given the magnitude of the emigration from Latvia and Lithuania, is their very demographic viability itself. Finally, many trumpet the virtues of ‘front-loading’ austerity cuts on the population, in line with the views of ‘shock-therapy architect’ Anders Aslund. Unlike Greece (at least until the Troika got to work), workplace rights and collective bargaining have all but disappeared in the Baltics. Up to 30 per cent of employees now exist within the informal economy in which workers have no rights whatsoever and if they are paid legal wages they are the legislated minimum, if not less. The Greek people are thus still in a more fortunate position compared to the Baltics and the push-back against austerity is growing. But here the comparison ends.

Chaos and Hegemony

Mohssen Massarrat

Berlin.

With last fall’s U.S. Congressional elections, the Barack Obama ‘era’ has entered its final phase. Shortly before coming to power, the new U.S. president had sparked a massive uproar when he proclaimed a new ‘Pacific century.’ Since then, roughly two years before the end of his term in office, we can see more clearly. First and foremost, the proclamation of an allegedly new orientation towards the Pacific served the purpose to put Europe, and particularly Germany, under pressure so that they fill the allegedly emerging security gap In reality, however, it is not the Pacific that forms the epicenter of U.S. geostrategic interests, neither – despite the Crimea crisis – is it the ‘old (European) world,’ but it is still the Middle East. For the latter’s fate defines whether American hegemony stands or falls.

America’s interest in this region is as old as the discovery of enormous Mideast oil reserves – albeit not at the moment, as is generally but falsely suggested, because of her own domestic oil supply. Thanks to its immense domestic energy resources, historically the U.S. has since the dawn of the last century been independent from importing oil. And with the current widespread use of fracking technology, it is once again about to become self-sufficient. As the new hegemonic power in the wake of the Second World War, the U.S. quickly realized that it could make rivaling world powers dependent on it by way of controlling the Middle East with its tremendous reserves of oil – the global economy’s fuel. Originally, the U.S., together with Saudi Arabia – its main ally in the region – established a global oil supply regime that could provide the West, China, and all BRICS countries with energy security. In this regime, Saudi Arabia arranged for constant overproduction. Thanks to this system that was politically controlled by the U.S., both its Western allies and its rivals enjoyed unimpeded oil supply at low prices – and all this despite great political turbulence raging during the entire second half of the last century. At the same time, the U.S. dollar, pegged to the oil price, acted as the global reserve currency.

However, when at the beginning of the 21st century the new economic giants China and India, with their almost inexhaustible hunger for energy, started organizing their own supply, the U.S.-dominated oil regime collapsed. The oil markets henceforth followed the pricing laws for exhaustible goods; oil prices therefore rose drastically and have subsequently been guided by market mechanisms.

The irony of history: Albeit the U.S. has lost the ability to steer the oil price – one of its central political leverages –, it has in another way been able to drastically strengthen its hegemony via the new prices set by the global market. For the high oil prices have multiplied the percentage share of oil trade within global trade, which caused massively higher demand for dollars and U.S. government bonds. As a result, for the foreseeable future the U.S. dollar will thereby remain the indisputable reserve currency.

It is precisely here that we can identify the actual basis for U.S. dominance: By way of an unlimited creation of the dollar as the globe’s reserve currency, the U.S. constitutes the only economy in the world that can finance several mega-projects at once – such as the bailing-out of banks and gigantic defense spending – through public debt and the issuing of government bonds. After the 2008 crash, no other national economy could have managed the banking crisis on its own without suffering any severe consequences. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), whose financial basis is essentially formed by the U.S Treasury’s government bonds, provided the U.S. with the required capital. The FDIC is an institution specifically created by the U.S. Congress to promote “stability and public confidence in the nation’s financial system.” Thereby, in fact, in 2009 the United States successfully nationalized all ailing banks in order to dispose its debt, and subsequently privatized them again. Meanwhile, in the European Union the banking crisis turned into a sovereign debt crisis.

Nonetheless, the global economic figures for the U.S. are anything but rosy: Its trade balance has witnessed deficits uninterruptedly since 1987, which until 2013 had led to an accumulated deficit of $9,627 billion. This is caused by the fact that the U.S. economy in parts, for a long time now, is no longer competitive vis-à-vis its main competitors – the EU, China, and Japan. Moreover, the fiscal deficit has chronically been on the rise, as result of from drastically growing defense spending. For decades, various U.S. administrations have ‘solved’ both problems – the trade deficit and concomitantly the constantly rising fiscal deficit – by allocating government bonds and engaging in money creation.

Technically, both objectives are being realized as follows: In order to conduct current government expenditures, the U.S. Treasury swaps government bonds with the FED in exchange for the latter’s freshly printed dollars – in 2013 alone, $1,100 billion were thus brought into circulation. The FED in turn places those government bonds on the world market and thereby continuously channels new capital into the U.S. economy, which provides for the balancing of the trade deficit. The price for this policy of money creation is the gigantic U.S. public debt, which climbed from $6,731 billion in 2003 to $17,556 billion in 2013. In the same time period, the public spending ratio rose from 60% to 108% (in comparison that of the EU ‘only’ rose from 60% to 87%).

No surprise then that such an economy suffering from trade as well as budgetary balance deficits has transformed into a consumptive surplus economy – amassing the largest national debt of all time. Between 2001 and 2013 only, these consumption surpluses accounted for a total of $11,550 billion. To put it plainly, per year an average $962.5 billion – capital corresponding with real economic performance – flowed from the rest of the world to the United States, while the latter confined itself to printing new money and bringing it into circulation.

To make it even more clear: In 2012, the $1,250 billion that flowed into the U.S. made up 7.9% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). This additional capital stock flowing into the economy also explains why the saving rate in the U.S. had drastically sunk during that period. Americans consumed nearly the totality of the goods and services they produced, while the rest of the world paid for investments allowing the U.S. economy to keep going.

Essentially, the U.S. has become to resemble Arab rentier states. Instead of oil, the U.S. uses the dollar – the international reserve currency – as leverage for appropriating its global purchasing power. While Saudi Arabia at least exports oil in exchange for other countries’ goods and services, the U.S. merely pumps paper into the global cash cycle.

The dollar as leverage

Here is the reason why: The significantly largest part of world trade is still being processed in dollars. This is why international demand for dollars is enormous, and is rising in proportion to world trade. Therefore, with the assistance of FED, the U.S. can continuously inject dollars into circulation, thereby financing its trade balance and budgetary deficits (and ultimately its constantly growing government debt). Hence, Nobel economics laureate Roger B. Myerson does not bother too much about U.S. debt: “U.S. debts are in dollars and the U.S. can print dollars. […] We may have inflation. But we are sure we can pay back the debt.”[3]

Yet, contrary to Myerson’s contention, in reality the U.S. will never pay back its debt, which has already been clear in the 1970s to U.S. economist Michael Hudson: “To the extent that these Treasury IOUs are being built into the world’s monetary base they will not have to be repaid, but are to be rolled over indefinitely. This feature is the essence of America’s free financial ride, a tax imposed at the entire globe’s expense.”

In truth, the U.S. can simply absorb the excess purchasing power that is created all over the world. All of this, however, only works as long as oil is being traded in dollars and the status of the U.S. currency is not being jeopardized by other potential reserve currencies, such as the euro or China’s renminbi. After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973, almost without anyone noticing, the gold standard got replaced by oil henceforth backing the dollar: oil was increasingly in demand by all countries – except for oil exporters; it is a homogeneous and scarce commodity with rising prices. As such, oil trade as a proportion of world trade continuously rose from 1.7% in 1970 to 6% in 2001, and to 12% in 2011 – resulting in a massively rising demand for dollars. Moreover, the ‘oil standard’ freed the U.S. from all shackles of the Bretton Woods agreement; it could henceforth accumulate new debt even more uninhibitedly than before.

The military as instrument

Yet, ensuring that the global oil trade will be carried out in dollars for decades to come requires a Middle East controlled by the U.S. as complete as possible. This can be done through regime changes wherever necessary in order to nip possible anti-dollar alliances in the bud. In this vein, the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was from the very start targeted towards such a direction, with its willingness to create a ‘Greater Middle East’ that ought to be subordinated to the U.S. to the greatest possible extent. In PNAC documents there is no mention of creating conditions for peace but instead for wars, for expanding military bases all around the world, for military superiority on land, in water and in the air, for nuclear defense shields in the earth’s atmosphere, and above all for further increases in defense spending.

Over the last decade, the U.S. with its annual defense budget of $500 billion to $800 billion has spent as much on armaments as the rest of the world combined. Any other national economy would have collapsed long ago under such tremendous unproductive spending. Indeed, the arms race during the Cold War did lead to the demise of the Soviet Union. In contrast, after the end of the bloc confrontation U.S. arms spending rose exponentially from $150 billion in 1990 to the astronomic sum of $739 billion in 2011. The share of military expenditure as a proportion of GDP is currently 4% in the U.S., more than twice that of other Western industrialized nations. The opposition, otherwise loudly opposing administration policies of increasing other budget items, refrains from criticizing military spending as a matter of principle, the exception being when an increase in military spending is deemed too low. Nor is this massive military spending subject to any substantial debate in the media or in society at large. But how can these enormous arms expenditures be explained and how are they justified to the people? Ultimately, this is done by the fact that the U.S. also covers its military spending by government debt and printing money. Instead, financing the costs of war via direct taxes would mobilize people against any war. Both World Wars were financed by public debt, not only by European but also all U.S. administrations. Through the continuity of wars, especially since the First World War, the U.S. public debt has continued to grow.

The de facto monopoly over world money explains how a national economy like that of the U.S., which in many areas is simply not competitive and shows chronic trade balance deficits, can finance not only such mega-projects as the military-industrial complex and various quite expensive wars, but also has a relatively stable financial sector and a currency that attracts magnet-like surplus capital from all over the world.

A world without order and chaos as opportunity – for the U.S.

To maintain its hegemony, the U.S. must by all means prevent the emergence of rival powers and impede possible current as well as future threats that could emanate from oil states. The ideal condition for enforcing its own goals at a low cost would be the fragmentation of antagonistic power centers through ethnic and religious strife, civil wars, chaos and deep-seated mistrust in the Middle East – always following the well-known premise of ‘divide and rule.’ In this way, for decades to come no other power would be able to even consider trading oil in a currency other than dollars. In addition, as all the opponents need petrodollars to purchase weapons, the oil wells gush merrily on – as they currently do in Iraq despite daily acts of terror and chaos paralyzing the country.

In fact, we are currently experiencing tremendous changes towards such a chaotic state of affairs. Meanwhile, there have been regime changes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. In all these countries, discord and distrust, tribal conflicts, territorial separations among ethnic lines and mutual terror have been raging – particularly from Sunnis against Shi’ites. However, the regime change project has not ended here. Now, Syria and Iran have been put in crosshairs: U.S. neo-cons have spared no efforts to torpedo the nuclear negotiations with Iran. And Al-Qaeda – officially the main reason for the U.S. ‘war on terror’ – has in the meanwhile attained unprecedented strength. This prowess provides, in turn, the best basis of legitimacy for the U.S. military-industrial complex.

The old military-industrial complex

This way all the strands of ‘dollar imperialism’ come together: oil, dollars, and the military. The military-industrial complex is the main beneficiary of the ‘new American century’ of New Wars. Especially in the Middle East both a nuclear and a conventional arms race is taking place, which is increasingly putting the arms race of the 1970s that had led to three Gulf Wars in the shade. While the recycling of petrodollars for weapons has resulted in a dangerous vicious circle which could at any time trigger a conflagration across the whole region, the U.S. defense sector can remain confident: All U.S. administrations, regardless of their political persuasion, will continue with impunity the policy of public debt and thus keep on financing the military budget. Thanks to the rising demand for dollars and the FED’s continued money printing (also under the new Board of Governors Chair, Janet Yellen), the U.S. banking system has such extensive money reserves that the politically dangerous U.S. military industry can be easily financed.

However, ‘dollar imperialism’ is fundamentally a highly unstable construction, producing absurdities difficult to imagine. On the one hand, it keeps alive a gigantic apparatus of violence in the U.S. – at the expense of (and ultimately financed by) the whole of humanity. On the other, this construction is based on chaos, violence, and civil wars, particularly in the oil-rich regions that may therefore collapse at any time, plunging the world into serious crises. In short, what could be more absurd than the fact that money belonging to all of us helps finance an industrial sector whose ultimate survival depends on there never being peace on the planet? Even the NSA scandal – revealed thanks to Edward Snowden – appears in a new, very particular light when seen against the background of the prevailing dollar imperialism. For, of course, this highly unstable construction generates a seemingly limitless greed for the widest possible control of all communication channels, including spying on the heads of all foreign administrations, even those of friendly states. Despite worldwide outrage, in his January 2014 speech, Barack Obama emphasized that “[o]ur intelligence agencies will continue to gather information about the intentions of governments [...] around the world.”

The massive U.S. security apparatus is being legitimized – today as in the past – exclusively on the grounds of national interests. When the NSA was founded in 1952, there was no talk of Al-Qaeda and ‘9/11,’ rather of the benefits and interests of a then aspiring hegemonic power. Today, the NSA is above all concerned with recognizing in due time all the steps and movements in the world that could endanger the current status of the U.S. currency, and nipping them in the bud by any means necessary. It thus functions in the interest of the influential alliance between the military-industrial complex and the U.S. financial sector, which is dependent on such knowledge for its own survival.

On the other hand, it has become clear that the NSA poses the biggest threat to democracy in the U.S. and in the West as a whole – and in a way in which President Dwight Eisenhower could not even imagine when he warned about the military-industrial complex in his farewell address on January 17, 1961: “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. […]  In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”

Roughly 50 years after Eisenhower’s warning, the U.S. has taken a major step ‘forward.’ This powerful complex has been struggling for its continued existence since the end of the bloc confrontation and has done everything possible to permanently consolidate American hegemony. It is indeed not the case, as was eagerly anticipated, that the world has become safer and more peaceful since 1989. On the contrary, it has become more insecure and warlike – as was the case at the dawn of the last century. This makes it even more urgent that the international community finally – and still perhaps just in time – defends itself against this highly dangerous development.

The alternative: The global energy transition and the diversification of reserve currencies

The question of democratizing the global economy by abolishing the U.S. monopoly over world money must definitely be placed on the global political agenda. In the long term, this goal can be most effectively attained by a global energy revolution – away from fossils and towards extensively expanding renewable energies. In the short term, a range of reserve currencies can and ought to be established, which would finally account for the real economic balance of forces.

One such alternative would also serve the long-term interests of American citizens and would contribute to the U.S. finally offloading the parasitic and ultimately unproductive parts of its economy – namely, the alliance between finance and the military. On the other hand, the example of Barack Obama, who had to move away from nearly all his positive reform initiatives, shows that America on her own and using her own abilities is barely capable of pushing back this all-powerful alliance including the political forces sustaining it.

This leads to Europe and Asia assuming responsibility: Only a new reserve currency – pushed forward by the EU and China – can help the U.S. leave its previous path of increasing prosperity through imperialist methods, to the benefit of its own immeasurable productive potentials. The BRICS countries’ establishment in Brazil in July 2014 of an international development bank and a monetary fund could evolve into a serious competitor to the Bretton Woods system. You could imagine the dollar being no longer the only world currency, and necessarily losing its stability in a lively international competition involving the euro and renminbi. International excess capital would then be withdrawn, to a considerable extent, from the U.S. and invested in the euro or renminbi zone. The previous U.S. policy of public debt by issuing government bonds would stall, and the bipartisan taboo on tackling military spending would lose its validity. In order to reduce chronic budget deficits, U.S. administrations would then have no other choice but to drastically cut the disproportionately high military budget.

How would such a new situation impact American hegemony? Inside the U.S. there would – finally – emerge a fierce debate over the sense and non-sense of military spending as well as its global military capacities (including over 800 bases) – with the prospect of the U.S. demilitarizing to a level corresponding to its actual economic weight. As such, the U.S. would no longer be the ‘only remaining superpower,’ but merely one among several world powers. Wholly new global power structures and balances of power would then become conceivable: Asia but also the Middle East, South America, Africa, and even Europe would have real opportunities to come together in cooperative and common-security regional architectures. At the same time, nationalistic and racist resentments and conflicts would strongly lose traction. Perhaps international cooperation would also finally shrink the financial sector to a reasonable level – in so doing also significantly increasing the possibility of an equitable distribution of income.

In short, we would finally have the prospect of a world with more justice and less financial speculation – a more democratic and peaceful world. Yet, the losers of such a scenario would be the military-industrial complex, the financial sector and its beneficiaries, and above all the neoconservatives. This is why we must expect fierce resistance. However, in the interest of a more just and peaceful world, this fight is nothing less than inevitable.

All Lives Matter

Robert Fantina

With the seemingly constant shooting of mostly young, black men by white police officers, with near-complete impunity, the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has, of necessity, come to life. To date, charges against the police perpetrating these crimes are uncommon, and convictions, very rare. The current incident in South Carolina, where white police officer Michael Thomas Slager was videotaped shooting Walter Lamar Scott in the back, eight times, may be the anomaly; it’s difficult to imagine anything less than a conviction for first degree murder, but this is the United States we are talking about, where, in the eyes of the law, black lives don’t seem to matter.

It isn’t just black men, young and old, who are so victimized; black women, too, are shunted to the margins of society. The phenomenon that has become known as ‘White Women’s Syndrome’ is common. White women, according to this theory, who are reported missing, are widely publicized. Ask anyone if they can mention a woman who was reported missing in the last few years, and several names will probably come to mind: Lacey Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, Holly Bobo. All, of course, are white. And while any decent person mourns the deaths of Ms. Peterson and Ms. Bobo, and rejoices at the safe recovery of Ms. Smart, it is not only white women who are reported to the authorities as missing. Women of color also disappear, but are seldom announced on the evening news, and stories of searches by friends, websites established to assist in locating them, the investigation, etc. rarely make the news.

It has been said that racism is dead in the U.S.; after all, people who make this bizarre proclamation say, the country elected a black president. Simply because the nation achieved that particular milestone is no indication of the state of racism in the U.S.

The parents of black youth routinely advise their sons how to behave if confronted by a police officer. In December of 2014, New York City mayor Bill DiBlasio said this, referring to his biracial son: that “because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.”

The old motto of the police, ‘to protect and serve’, no longer seems valid. In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that “the police did not have a
constitutional duty to protect a person from harm”; this in the case of a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband. The man had kidnapped their three daughters from her home, and called his estranged wife to say they were all at an amusement park. Despite the fact that arrest was mandated if the man violated the court order, the police did not respond. The man then killed the three girls, and was eventually killed by the police.

So if your local police department isn’t there to ‘protect and serve’, what is its purpose? Many municipalities provide their police departments with military weaponry. Since the police are not responsible for national defense, one could reasonably ask who such weaponry might be expected to be used against.

What military weaponry is provided to the local police, and how do they get it? A federal program, called the “1033 program,” enables the Pentagon to send local police departments military weapons, at no charge. Equipment such as M-16s and armored personnel carriers like MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles) are now common in many cities. Why on earth would any local community require mine-resistant vehicles? In the last twenty years, $5.1 billion in such weaponry has been provided to U.S. police departments.

Additionally, it is helpful to look at the training that several police departments in the U.S. receive. Israel, which has institutional racism built into its laws, discriminating against Africans and Arabs, and has one of the most brutal military systems in the world, has trained numerous police departments in the United States.

As police departments become more and more militarized, the justice department seems to follow suit. Groucho Marx once said that “Military justice is to justice as military music is to music”. In the military, the justice system is a system apart from civilian justice. Now, it seems, the rules of justice for police officers is also a system apart.

Internationally, the U.S. continues to disgrace itself with racism. A year ago, three Israeli settlers went missing and were found dead. Even before their deaths were announced, Israel was raiding homes in the West Bank, arresting hundreds of people, and increasing the rate of terrorism it normally perpetrates. The U.S. financed and supported its every move, including the genocidal bombing of the Gaza Strip that followed. This year alone, dozens of Palestinians have been killed by Israelis, either IOF (Israeli Occupation Forces; read: terrorists), or illegal settlers (also terrorists). The U.S. has not raised a word in objection. But it continues to bomb mainly Arab countries, calling its innocent victims terrorists.

So are the police and what passes for the justice system working together to assure a peaceful, repressed, white-majority rule in the U.S? War-mongering seems to work so well (although not with complete success) in keeping Third World countries from opposing their U.S.-backed dictators, so perhaps domestic fear-mongering will help to keep the poor from demanding basic rights. And what better way to instill and maintain that fear than arbitrarily shooting perceived members of the poor?

What must be done to change this dynamic? It won’t be done through the courts; the hens will get nothing by appealing to the foxes. Legislation will accomplish nothing; civil rights laws are on the books, but they are interpreted by the justice system. Continued, strong and sustained resistance, coupled with education, is the only possible answer. Sadly, more blood from the bullet-ridden bodies of people of color will be spilled, because of and during this resistance. Yet it appears increasingly that there is no other way.

Dispatch From Beijing

Tom Clifford

Beijing.

Three China-related events caused the world’s political and economic axis to shift in March and April.

Taken separately, each event had its own importance but taken together they added up to a sum greater than their parts.

Local government bonds, the evacuation of hundreds of foreigners by the PLA from Yemen and the confirmation of founding members for Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank have seen a subtle but profound change in the way the world turns.

First the local governments, many governing territories and populations bigger than most European states, were given the green light in March to exchange 1 trillion yuan ($160 billion) of high-interest debt (about one third of their debt) for cheaper bonds. This will probably be expanded to cover their full debts, estimated to be  at least 3 trillion yuan as of June 2013 (the latest figures available). Much of this debt had been borrowed through third parties to avoid restrictions on direct regional and local government borrowing and to shore up falling revenue from land sales, about 25 percent of their previous income, from a property slump. However this pans out, and risk and opportunity are seen as bedfellows in China, global financial markets have a bond issuance scheme that will have a growing influence on global money markets.

The evacuation of hundreds of foreigners from 10 countries earlier this month (April) from Yemen marked the first time that the Chinese military had carried out such a mission. It will not be the last.

But it is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that has already had an impact, before a single loan has been approved.

Washington considers the AIIB a four-letter word. It also considers it as a challenger to its financial hegemony. On both counts, Washington is right but what should concern those in the corridors of power in the Capitol is not the new bank but the circumstances that have deemed it necessary for such an institution to exist.

Asia is suffering from an infrastructure deficit and the global financial institutions cannot fund the necessary construction. Estimates are that from now to 2020, Asia will need some $8tn for infrastructure.

China has more than $3 trillion in reserves (roughly the same amount as the estimated local government debt). Money buys options and China has options but the most altruistic and sensible, from Beijing’s point of view, is to set up a bank with others boasting start-up capital of $50bn  to build sewage projects, ports, clean energy platforms, roads, and railways to oil the wheels of trade. Beijing’s stated goal is to enhance land and maritime routes to markets in Asia and Europe under the Silk Road initiative. But the lack of adequate infrastructure is a problem that has to be tackled. To reinforce the point, the bank, which had a March 31 deadline for potential founding members to apply, has the word infrastructure in its name.

In the 19th century and 20th century Britain recycled its reserves by building the world’s railways and securing the sea lanes,  in the days before the Somme and Ypres carnage and crippling war debt. The US rebuilt Europe in the 1950s through the Marshall Plan.

Instead of grasping its significance, Washington’s response to the bank verged on the petty as it tried to warn off potential suitors.

For 70 years, since Bretton Woods, by droit de seigneur World Bank chiefs are always American. IMF chiefs are European. The US clings steadfastly to its IMF veto and Capitol Hill has yet to endorse reform of the IMF quota system that gives the US four times as much power as China, and is stalling on an expansion of IMF funding that would allow for major global infrastructure projects. Hence the need, seen from Beijing, for the AIIB. And Washington’s attempts to browbeat friends and allies into not joining misfired. Britain, Germany, France and many others have signed up. What Washington should have done is quickly issue a statement along the lines of  “we welcome working with the AIIB in its attempts to bolster further development and economic growth in a part of the world that is growing ever more important for world trade’’. That message has now been delivered but it arrived too late and with the credibility of an expired cheque.

Jacob Lew, the US Treasury Secretary, understands exactly what is happening. “It’s not an accident that emerging economies are looking at other places because they are frustrated that the US has stalled a very mild and reasonable set of reforms in the IMF,” he said.

The last decade has seen the phrase “China’s growing clout” enter the financial and political lexicon. It is not without an element of irony that China has now displayed its clout in the economic and military spheres with relatively little fanfare.

The Tragedy of Capitalism

Ron Jacobs

In 1968, the article “The Tragedy of the Commons” was published in Science magazine. The author of the article, Garret Hardin, whom critic Beryl Crowe called a “psychologically brave, but professionally foolhardy soul” in his response to Hardin’s piece the following year (also in Science), essentially argued that the commons could only be maintained in today’s world if it was privatized. He based his argument on an understanding of humanity that was Malthusian in its approach and assumed that the “rational” human is essentially a selfish human. Historian Peter Linebaugh published an essay titled “Enclosures from the Bottom Up” in which he labels Hardin’s argument “a brutal argument with an inhuman conclusion.”

That essay is but one of several that appears in Linebaugh’s 2014 book Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance. The collections of essays are, when considered as a whole, a history of the struggle over the commons, from medieval times up to today. That struggle is a struggle between the rich and the commoner, the corporation and worker, the state and the people. It is a struggle replete with tales of heroic resistance and murderous repression. It is also a struggle which has probably never been sharper than today. Linebaugh examines this history, mixing stories of Luddite resistance with critical analysis of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

The book opens with a mention of the Occupy movement of 2011. Recalling that popular upsurge involving people collectively occupying space in cities across the globe (especially in the United States and Europe), Linebaugh suggests that the movement was a contradiction. The city, he writes, is a place of consumption, whereas the countryside is where food and other materials required for life are produced. It is in the latter where the commons have been historically maintained and fought over. Yet, the Occupy movement existed and flourished in urban spaces. He counters this perception by providing a history that shows the city to be originally the result of the enclosure of the commons. From this point on, Stop Thief! takes the reader on a ride through revolutions and reactions, colonialism and imperialism, Karl Marx and Tom Paine.

Over the course of that ride, the reader is presented with a reasoned and reasonable look at the phenomena that encroach on one’s life and liberty. He first introduces these culprits in an essay titled “The City and the Commons: A Story for Our Times.” The culprits are not only named by their mode of operation—land privatization, population control, criminalization of custom, and imprisonment—they are also named by those their parents gave them. This gang of four’s names are Jeremy Bentham, Arthur Young, Thomas Malthus, and Patrick Colquhoun and their mark on history and humanity remains. It is the story of this reality that fills the rest of Linebaugh’s text.

Summoning Marx’s discussion of what the landowners called the “theft of wood” from the forests they had their armies enclose; Linebaugh begins a fascinating discussion of capitalist accumulation and its ongoing role in today’s mechanics of neoliberalism. In his essay on the fictional hero Ned Ludd, the Luddites and Percy Bysshe Shelley, one is reminded that class suicide existed well before Amilcar Cabral or the Weather Underground. In later chapters that include the French revolution and the American War for Independence, Linebaugh challenges the official narrative and asks why the Native Americans and African slaves are not included. In one chapter, the resistance to the enclosure of the Otmoor commons in Oxfordshire is described. This enclosure involved the privatization of the moor and the exclusion of sheep and cattle from grazing there. Peasants resisted with force and creative takeovers of the lands.

Incorporating feminist thought and Marxism, the role played by the division of labor that occurred in the wake of the industrial revolution is examined. According to Linebaugh, when women were relegated to the home they were, in essence, being enclosed away from the commons. If they did work, their job was likely to be performing one small task as part of the creation of a whole product. This alienation from the final product is in itself an enclosing of the mind, spirit and even the person. Of course, this alienation was felt by men in the factory, too. In shutting down the relationship to the completed product, the human being is/was being cut off from the commons. Karl Marx expresses this aspect of modern labor more precisely than anyone before or since in his section on estranged labor in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844:

“What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor? First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that 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 feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.”

Like Marx, Linebaugh draws the connection between the privatization of property and the estrangement of labor; the enclosure of the commons/common good and the alienation of humans from their work and from each other. Stop Thief! is simultaneously a look at the history of this process through a series of essays discussing people and events important to it and a discussion of its meaning for the present. Linebaugh blends the tales of the common man and woman, the poet and artist, and the economist and political scientist into prose that is poetic in approach and a delight to digest. One cannot help but learn from the lessons herein.

The Secret History of Globalization

Stephen Martin

The key theme of the Western World in the first quarter of the 21st Century, the Zeitgeist perchance, is that of austerity reflecting a transfer of resources? This austerity is polymorphous and is growing, certainly not as a matter of ‘happenstance’, but rather as expressive of strategy and tactics in a theater of economic warfare as the biggest ‘racket’ around, following on from the insight of Smedley Butler?

On a personal level the ‘racket Geopolitical’ aka Globalization is experienced by approximately 84% of the population of the Western World as reduction in the quality of life; whether this be downgrade from homeowner to renter; from well paid job to subsistence level wages where longer hours for less is the trend; from the sense that one is being ‘kept in the dark’ and fed bullshit when it comes to ‘corporatist mainstream media'; or that all mainstream represented Politicians and Political parties ceased long ago to have any real differences when it comes to representation of the ‘Demos’ or People – Democrat or Republican (USA), Conservative or New Labour (UK) – and the examples with regards to other Western Nations following such two main ‘choices’ paradigm matter not, for all the propagated and funded mainstream parties in the Western World are Corporatist in essence as asine qua non of the very same austerity which orthodoxy entails?

Democracy is dead behind a shroud in the 21st Century Western World; assassinated by Corporatism as expression of the economic warfare waged by a tiny majority (less than 1%) of the population?

In the brief ‘delineation’ of the decline of quality of life above so much has been missed out; there was no mention of imprisonment, of zero hours contracts, of unemployment, of the increase of prohibitions, of the diminishment of Human Rights, of the degeneration of privacy. The overall trend as ‘schemed’ by Globalization, however, is one of the majority giving up more in order that a minority may expropriate more as according to warfare – with the unstated objective of ‘Ecocide’, such the evil? (More on which below)

This small article seeks to outline a ‘secret history’ as a ‘CounterPunch’ against the shroud of propaganda which would preserve secrecy and ‘advance’ Globalization as that abrogation of Humanity which is Corporatism; which would have nought but lies furthering a continuity of ‘transfer of resources’, and which at basic level would screw theDemos to the point of their transformation to being no more than dispossessed ‘serfs’ in some tragic reiteration of a Feudal Society; the real tragedy being that the axiom ‘it does not have to be this way’ represents a squandering of the potential of Man?

This small article demands truth, all be it that the truth of the 21st Century Western World is ‘pungently obnoxious’ such the ugly tragedy as has been made by pathological pragmatists pursuing a parasitology to point of the reduction of the world thru economic warfare to no more than a mere ‘concentration camp’ whereby the concept of marginal costs equalling marginal revenues (profit maximization) means austerity as a transfer of resources?

This, the Western World as it ‘stands’ -and if you think it is ‘bad’ now then the next Decade, if all goes according to the strategy and tactics of the ‘scheme’ of degenerate parasites, is to be a revelation concerning collateral damage and the sufferance of the Demos, or ‘The People’?

The secret history of Globalization is of a Monopoly and its kissing cousin Oligopoly which is being brought in to being in the Capitalist Western World thru economic warfare pursued to the level of degeneracy which Goebbels described as ‘totaler krieg’?

The secret history is one of the consolidation of assets in which a many faced Corporate ‘Hydra’ has arisen as a parasite which destroys Democracy, and which ensures that ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ is reduced to being applicable to a minority – for the majority a ‘concentration camp’ as some variant of a concentrated animal feeding operation is the order of the day as reflected in the growing polarisation or concentration of wealth?

This small article looks at the events of 2007/2008 not as ‘happenstance’, but as the application of a methodology in a theater of war scenario where strategy and tactics are pursued at a Geopolitical level as ‘incorporates’ the Western World.

In 2007 the economic system known as Capitalism in the Western World as a consideration of International Finance was wilfully and deliberately poisoned as to the trope ‘Carrying the Antidote’. The coup de grâce in such a strategy was the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The creation of toxic weapons of financial mass destruction, primarily subprime mortgages as mortgage backed securities, did not occur as the result of some ‘lone gunman’ isolated act of madness, but rather was part of a carefully calculated and co-ordinated act of economic warfare, designed to poison an economic system at a Geopolitical level with the overarching rationale of possessing the antidote administered contingent, meaning using same antidote to consolidate assets as a euphemism for ‘takeover’? Think of it as a grand ‘structural adjustment program’ (SAP) leveraged to the point of subsuming multiple previously existent sovereignty of Nations as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) talks about gleeful, where the debt is relieved contingent upon there being a ‘consolidation of assets’, i.e. a ‘unified opening up of control’ to the private interests of Globalists as Stateless Bastards. The reason there would be secrecy about the beneficiaries of the TARP is that it was desirable, given the criminal degeneracy of the whole ‘enterprise’, that there be a lack of transparency (i.e. shroud of propaganda prevailing) concerning the geographical diversity which the application of bailout funds encompassed. That Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse, amongst other such as RBS and HBOS, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Canada and even the Bank of Japan were involved in some variant of ‘bailout’ as synonym for ‘antidote’ was towards the ends of an act of economic warfare where the strategic objective was as according to the well worn maxim of ‘control thru debt’ administered by way of loan as an ‘antidote’. The banks which did not know they were buying in to toxic assets and getting themselves into debt were the ‘rubes’, and what happened in 2007/2008 was towards the formation of ‘one bank’ – and the articles of Jeff Nielson, the author of article hyperlinked is well worth a read, his finger most certainly on the pulse Geopolitical, and even better he has a sense of humor!

As to the banks which did know about the toxic weapons of financial mass destruction; then we enter the realms of the application of forensic accounting which has as axiom ‘follow the money’ as derived from perchance the greatest of questions ‘Cui Bono’?

Allied to such consolidation of assets occurring the arena of International Finance as aspect of Corporatism Geopolitical (spit, spit), is the consolidation of assets which the growing matrix of extractive, manufacturing and service industries at Transnational Corporation (TNC) level represents as part of a ‘unification’ megalomania. This article in ‘New Scientist’ reveals the state of play some six years ago concerning transnational corporations and ‘the idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy’ – what would be really interesting would be to see an update on such ‘concentration camp’ alongside an analysis of how ‘bailout’ (for the bailout was not just applied to Banks, but also to corporations such as General Motors) impacted upon control, and from control, thence to manipulation such the denouement of degeneracy this instance?

And so to the moral dimension.

Necrotrophic parasites which kill the host perchance have a role in nature; to such extent they are lesser than mere tapeworms or leeches which as a rule will not kill the host but will drain their vivacity considerably. The tragedy is that what we got, in considering the corruption and degeneration of the Capitalist system in the Economic world represented by the West in the early 21st Century, is a racket operated by gangsters who have succeeded in putting a fix in to the point where there is Casino Capitalism, where the Casino is further rigged and so cheating at an even greater level of depravity can prevail. What were previously competitors, what was previously expressive of ‘life liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, is now a closed system in as much as what was previously a bet with calculated odds in favor of the house has become rigged further by hidden levers which ensure that illusion triumphs over reality, and that the ‘con’ exists at every contingency such the ubiquity of the grift and the graft as expressive of the death of Humanity in favour of criminal degeneracy. When the ball drops in to the number, as in ‘Roulette’, it now means that not only is less paid out than should be, but that there is a secret mechanism which has determined same, such the ‘rigging’. Read a ‘Random Walk Down Wall St.’ and weep at the naiveté, same sense as watching a boxing match you know has been fixed, because this is ‘sic transit Gloria Mundi’ as the Western World exists now behind a shroud which is, such the irony, an ‘Iron Curtain’ which would ‘progress’ thru Corporatism portraying itself as ‘Democracy’, such the disease which parasitology encompasses?

Globalization is a distinct dystopia; a ‘vision’ emanating from Hell, where illusion prevails and truth, like thought, is dead, alongside such concepts as mercy, justice and equality?

The mechanisms of economic warfare are themselves innocuous sounding; quantitative ease, high frequency trading, credit rating, bail out and bail in, wash trade, free market; the reality is that the methodical application of these economic concepts towards furthering Corporatism as greed has resulted in a greater sufferance on Humanity inflicted than the First and Second World Wars combined?

For the secret history of Globalization is the history of a disease in which one small minority of ‘men’ would rule the vast majority and treat them as less than animals on a farm, would control and manipulate to the point where there the belief that ‘toxic shit is good for you’ prevails, and where the People express their being controlled and manipulated thru committing horrendous acts against others such as themselves in the racket which military warfare has always been. Globalization is ‘Thanatos’ to the ‘Eros’ which is Democracy and Sovereignty of State, and in the fomented pit which the Western World has come to rest in the 21st Century there are yet more schemes which would be ‘secret’, and portrayed, such the shroud, as beneficial to Humanity? Foremost amongst such schemes the Trans-Pacific Partnership which would draw the shroud tighter on Democracy and Sovereignty of State in further ‘elevating’ Transnational Corporations as ‘Masters of the Universe’?

There is little of comfort in this small article, other than forewarned is forearmed. The fact is that there is a growing recognition amongst People that Corporations are not to be trusted?

There is hope also in the maxim articulated by Abraham Lincoln that:

‘You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time’?

The War on Black America

Glen Ford

“Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival….”

– Frederick Douglass

The United States produced a bumper crop of what Billie Holiday would call “Strange Fruit,” in March: at least 111 bodies, the majority of them unarmed men of color, shot down by police in the blood-fertilized streets of American cities. If one just counts the unarmed victims, that’s a rate of about two extrajudicial executions per day, roughly twice the “one every 28 hours” cited by the Malcolm X Grassroots Network’s 2012 report, Operation Ghetto Storm.

Yet, in the same month, President Obama declared Venezuela a threat to the national security of the United States, based largely on the death of 14 “dissidents” during a period of anti-government disturbances back in 2014. Many of the dead were pro-government activists killed by “dissidents.” By contrast, Philadelphia police have been shooting an average of one person a week for the last eight years, the overwhelming majority of them Black and brown, according to a new U.S. Justice Department report. As Frederick Douglass said, “for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

All across the country, the granting of impunity for the perpetrators of summary execution of Black men, women and children is “everyday practice” – now certified as “best practice” by Attorney General Eric Holder, who claims court precedents preclude prosecution of killer cops except under the most extreme conditions. (See “It’s Not the Law – but Prosecutors – That Give Immunity to Killer Cops,” December 10, 2014.)

Given the odds against prosecution, officer Michael T. Slager probably counts himself the unluckiest white man in South Carolina. A neighborhood resident’s phone camera captured Slager firing repeatedly into the back of 50 year-old Walter L. Scott, a Black North Charleston father of four with no criminal record who had been stopped for a minor traffic violation, tussled with the officer, and tried to run away.

Despite his claims to have been in fear for his life, Slager was charged with murder – a fate he would surely have avoided had he been under the jurisdiction of St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch. Last year, McCulloch’s team led grand jurors to believe that “the law” allowed police to use deadly force against unarmed persons fleeing a felony, as Ferguson officer Darren Wilson claimed was the case with Michael Brown. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such shootings unconstitutional in 1985, as every public defender knows – and McCulloch surely knew, as well. The South Carolina cop also had the bad judgment to commit murder in clear view of a private citizen’s well-held camera.

Last weekend in the town of Zion, Illinois, about 30 miles north of Chicago, cops killed 17-year-old Justus Howell with two shots to the back while he was running away, according to the coroner’s office. Initially, the police reported no weapon on his body, but later the cops claimed the teenager had stolen a gun from another man minutes earlier, leading them to give chase. In time, the cops produced a gun,
which they will connect to the other Black man, who was held on $15,000 bail, and thereby seek to justify the killing of the unarmed, fleeing teenager Justus Howell.

Cleveland cop Michael Brelo distinguished himself as the most murderous member of a mob of 104 cops on a chase-and-shoot spree in Cleveland, Ohio, back in November, 2012. Mistaking a car engine backfire for a gunshot, the crazy cop caravan careened through Cleveland at speeds reaching 100 miles an hour, cornering Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30, in a school parking lot. Russell and Williams, unarmed, died in a hail of 137 bullets – 49 of them fired by Officer Brelo, now on trial for voluntary manslaughter. Brelo and his partner fired 15 bullets through their own windshield at the Black victims’ car. Then, at a point when, according to the prosecutor, no cop’s life was in danger (except from other officers), Brelo jumped on the hood of the victims’ car and fired 15 more shots at the mortally wounded man and woman. Today, the cop says he has no recollection of the entire episode.

In December, the U.S. Justice Department concluded that Cleveland cops routinely use excessive force and are unaccountable to the public. The month before, in November, a city cop killed 12 year-old Tamir Rice as he played with a toy gun at a park. The officer shot the child twice after observing him for a total of two seconds.

“Officer Brelo’s blank memory on the shootings of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, and officer Timothy Loehmann’s blink-of-an-eye deliberations on terminating Tamir Rice, point up the utter lack of value U.S. society places on Black lives. The high-profile killings this week, the obscene death toll last month, the unreported and delayed deaths, are a constant in the bloody history of America. When President Obama insists that racism is not, and has never been, “endemic” to this country, he is simply identifying himself as an active participant in the ongoing slaughter.

The police, as guardians of the State, believe they are simply doing their jobs. They must be right, since they continue to receive praise, protection and overwhelming white support for carrying out their mission as an army of occupation in Black America. The advent of the Internet and a heightened Black community awareness of police depredations, especially since the murder of Trayvon Martin, in February of 2012, has created the perception among many African Americans that police violence has dramatically increased in recent years. However, history and irrefutable statistics tell us that the “militarization” of the police and the criminalization of Black people as a group are fundamental aspects of a national mission begun in earnest in the late Sixties. Michelle Alexander calls it the “New Jim Crow.” Some of us at BAR prefer the term Mass Black Incarceration State, to describe the superstructure of Black control that has been erected over the past 45 years, a machinery that has so relentlessly criminalized the Black community that one out of every eight prison inmates on Earth is an African American. Any genuine movement for criminal justice “reform” must, therefore, aim to abolish the Mass Black Incarceration State, root and branch, by removing the “occupation” army from Black areas and replacing it with a force of Black people’s own choosing.

The U.S government set in motion the mass Black incarceration regime in the late Sixties for the purpose of counter-insurgency. The structures of Black containment, control and incarceration are now central to the workings of criminal justice in the United States – to the misfortune of lots of white youth who get sucked into the system as unintended “collateral damage.” The logic of the project dictates that those who attempt to dismantle the Black counter-insurgency regime will be treated as insurgents, themselves – a central fact for the Black Lives Matter movement to grapple with.

The wave of state violence that smashed the Black Panther Party when it challenged the police “army of occupation” in the late Sixties, never subsided, but was instead hard-wired into the criminal justice system, nationwide. That’s why the system’s operatives are still trying to kill Mumia Abu Jamal, a former Black Panther and probably the world’s best known political prisoner. That’s why so many other Party comrades are still behind bars – because they are symbols and icons of insurgency, and U.S. police and prison structures have been on a counter-insurgency mission for nearly half a century. And, that’s why the Black Is Back Coalition will hold a national conference on Black Community Control of Police, in St. Louis, April 18 and 19 – because there will be no justice and no peace until the occupying army is gone from our streets.

Black people must decide how that can be accomplished – by any means necessary.