Steady State Socialism

Alan Johnstone

In 1923 the communist activist Sylvia Pankhurst opened an article with the declaration that ‘Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance…We do not call for limitation of births, for penurious thrift, and self-denial. We call for a great production that will supply all, and more than all the people can consume.’ (1) We have the technology and the know-how to end deprivation and offer everyone on this planet the decent and comfortable standard of life they deserve that Sylvia advocated and it need not take decades to come about. Yes, socialism can bring security to billions within our lifetimes. It is achievable.

Along with folk like Herman Daly, socialists are seeking ultimately to establish a steady-state economy (or ‘zero-growth’) society, a situation where human needs sits in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them. Such a society would already have decided, according to its own criteria and through its own decision-making processes, on the most appropriate way to allocate resources to meet the needs of its members. This having been done, it would only need to go on repeating this continuously from production period to production period. Production would not be ever-increasing but would be stabilized at the level required to satisfy needs. All that would be produced would be products for consumption and the products needed to replace and repair the raw materials and instruments of production used up in producing these consumer goods. The point about such a situation is that there will no longer be any imperative need to develop productivity, i.e. to cut costs in the sense of using less resources; nor will there be the blind pressure to do so that is exerted under capitalism through the market.

It will also create an ecologically benign relationship with nature. In socialism we would not be bound to use the most labour efficient methods of production. We would be free to select our methods in accordance with a wide range of socially desirable criteria, in particular the vital need to protect the environment. What it means is that we should construct permanent, durable means of production which you don’t constantly innovate. We would use these to produce durable equipment and machinery and durable consumer goods designed to last for a long time, designed for minimum maintenance and made from materials which if necessary can be re-cycled. In this way we would get a minimum loss of materials; once they’ve been extracted and processed they can be used over and over again. It also means that once you’ve achieved satisfactory levels of consumer goods, you don’t insist on producing more and more. Total social production could even be reduced. This will be the opposite of to-day's capitalist system’s cheap, shoddy, “throw-away” goods and built-in obsolescence, which results in a massive loss and destruction of resources.

In a stable society such as socialism, needs would change relatively slowly. Hence it is reasonable to surmise that an efficient system of stock control, recording what individuals actually chose to take under conditions of free access from local distribution centres over a given period, would enable the local distribution committee to estimate what the need for food, drink, clothes and household goods would be over a similar future period. Some needs would be able to be met locally: local transport, restaurants, builders, repairs and some food are examples as well as services such as street-lighting, libraries and refuse collection. The local distribution committee would then communicate needs that could not be met locally to the bodies charged with coordinating supplies to local communities.

Of course there will be a short phase where there an increase in production will be necessary to relieve the worst problems of food shortages, health-care and housing which affect billions of people throughout the world. There will also be action to construct the means of production and infrastructures such as transport systems for the commencement of the supply of permanent housing and durable consumption goods. These would be designed in line with conservation principles, which means they would be made to last for a long time, using materials that where possible could be re-cycled and would require minimum maintenance. When these objectives have been accomplished there would begin an eventual fall in production, and society could move into a stable mode. This would achieve a rhythm of daily production in line with daily needs with no significant growth. On this basis, the world community could reconcile two great needs, the need to live well whilst sharing and caring for the planet, sparing it from excesses.

Whether it is called ‘the market economy, ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘free enterprise’ (or even ‘mixed’ or ‘state-command’ economy”), the social system under which we live is capitalism. Capitalism is primarily an economic system of competitive capital accumulation out of the surplus value produced by wage labour. As a system it must continually accumulate or go into crisis. Consequently, human needs and the needs of our natural environment take second place to this imperative. The result is waste, pollution, environmental degradation and unmet needs on a global scale. The ecologist’s dream of a sustainable ‘zero growth’ within capitalism will always remain just that, a dream. If human society is to be able to organise its production in an ecologically acceptable way, then it must abolish the capitalist economic mechanism of capital accumulation and gear production instead to the direct satisfaction of needs.

The problem for a great number of people in the environmental movement is that they want to retain the market system in which goods are distributed through sales at a profit and people’s access to goods depends upon their incomes. The market, however, can only function with a constant pressure to renew its capacity for sales; and if it fails to do this production breaks down, people are out of employment and suffer a reduced income. It is a fundamental flaw and an insoluble contradiction in the green capitalist argument that they want to retain the market system, which can only be sustained by continuous sales and continuous incomes, and at the same time they want a conservation society with reduced productive activity. These aims are totally incompatible with each other. Also what many green thinkers advocate in their version of a “steady-state” market economy, is that the surplus would be used not to reinvest in expanding production, nor in maintaining a privileged class in luxury but in improving public services while maintaining a sustainable balance with the natural environment. It’s the old reformist dream of a tamed capitalism, minus the controlled expansion of the means of production an earlier generation of reformists used to envisage.

David Pepper in his ‘Eco-Socialism’(2) suggests we start from a concern for the suffering of humans and look for a solution to this. This makes us ‘anthropocentric’ as opposed to the ‘ecocentrism’ – Nature first – of many ecologists. The plunder and destruction of Nature is rejected as not being in the interests of the human species, not because the interests of Nature come first. Environmentalists can learn from Marx’s materialist conception of history which makes the way humans are organised to meet their material needs the basis of any society. Humans meet their material needs by transforming parts of the rest of nature into things that are useful to them; this in fact is what production is. So the basis of any society is its mode of production which, again, is the same thing as its relationship to the rest of nature. Humans survive by interfering in the rest of nature to change it for their own benefit. Those active in the ecology movement tend to see this interference as inherently destructive of nature. It might do this, but there is no reason why it has to. That humans have to interfere in nature is a fact of human existence. How humans interfere in nature, on the other hand, depends on the kind of society they live in. It is absurd to regard human intervention in nature as some outside disturbing force, since humans are precisely that part of nature which has evolved that consciously intervenes in the rest of nature; it is our nature to do so. True, that at the present time, the form human intervention in the rest of Nature takes is upsetting natural balances and cycles, but the point is that humans, unlike other life-forms, are capable of changing their behaviour. In this sense the human species is the brain and voice of Nature i.e. Nature become self-conscious. But to fulfil this role humans must change the social system which mediates their intervention in nature. A change from capitalism to a community where each contributes to the whole to the best of his or her ability and takes from the common fund of produce what he or she needs.

Present-day society, capitalism, which exists all over the globe is a class-divided society where the means of production are owned and controlled by a tiny minority of the population only. Capitalism differs from previous class societies in that under it production is not for direct use, not even of the ruling class, but for sale on a market. To repeat, competitive pressures to minimise costs and maximise sales, profit-seeking and blind economic growth, with all their destructive effects on the rest of nature, are built-in to capitalism. These make capitalism inherently environmentally unfriendly. It is a highly misleading notion that society can live with a market economy that is ‘green’, ‘ecological’, or ‘moral’, under conditions of wage labour, exchange, competition and the like.

Humans behave differently depending upon the conditions that they live in. Human behaviour reflects society. In a society such as capitalism, people’s needs are not met and reasonable people feel insecure. People tend to acquire and hoard goods because possession provides some security. People have a tendency to distrust others because the world is organised in such a dog-eat-dog manner. If people didn’t work society would obviously fall apart. To establish socialism the vast majority must consciously decide that they want socialism and that they are prepared to work in socialist society. If people want too much? In a socialist society ‘too much’ can only mean ‘more than is sustainably produced.’ For socialism to be established the productive potential of society must have been developed to the point where, generally speaking, we can produce enough for all. This is not now a problem as we have long since reached this point. However, this does require that we appreciate what is meant by ‘enough’ and that we do not project on to socialism the insatiable consumerism of capitalism.

If people decide that they (individually and as a society) need to over-consume then socialism cannot possibly work. Under capitalism, there is a very large industry devoted to creating needs. Capitalism requires consumption, whether it improves our lives or not, and drives us to consume up to, and past, our ability to pay for that consumption. In a system of capitalist competition, there is a built-in tendency to stimulate demand to a maximum extent. Firms, for example, need to persuade customers to buy their products or they go out of business. They would not otherwise spend the vast amounts they do spend on advertising. There is also in capitalist society a tendency for individuals to seek to validate their sense of worth through the accumulation of possessions. The prevailing ideas of society are those of its ruling class so then we can understand why, when the wealth of that class so preoccupies the minds of its members, such a notion of status should be so deep-rooted. It is this which helps to underpin the myth of infinite demand. It does not matter how modest one’s real needs may be or how easily they may be met; capitalism’s “consumer culture” leads one to want more than one may materially need since what the individual desires is to enhance his or her status within this hierarchal culture of consumerism and this is dependent upon acquiring more than others have got. But since others desire the same thing, the economic inequality inherent in a system of competitive capitalism must inevitably generate a pervasive sense of relative deprivation. What this amounts to is a kind of institutionalised envy and that will be unsustainable as more peoples are drawn into alienated capitalism.

In socialism, status based upon the material wealth at one’s command, would be a meaningless concept. The notion of status based upon the conspicuous consumption of wealth would be devoid of meaning because individuals would stand in equal relation to the means of production and have free access to the resultant goods and services. Why take more than you need when you can freely take what you need? In socialism the only way in which individuals can command the esteem of others is through their contribution to society, and the stronger the movement for socialism grows the more will it subvert the prevailing capitalist ethos, in general, and its anachronistic notion of status, in particular.

All wealth would be produced on a strictly voluntary basis. Work in socialist society could only be voluntary since there would be no group or organ in a position to force people to work against their will. Free access to goods and services denies to any group or individuals the political leverage with which to dominate others (a feature intrinsic to all private-property or class based systems through control and rationing of the means of life.) This will work to ensure that a socialist society is run on the basis of democratic consensus. Goods and services would be provided directly for self-determined needs and not for sale on a market; they would be made freely available for individuals to take without requiring these individuals to offer something in direct exchange. The sense of mutual obligations and the realisation of universal interdependency arising from this would profoundly colour people’s perceptions and influence their behaviour in such a society. We may thus characterise such a society as being built around a moral economy and a system of generalised reciprocity.

Capitalism is not just an exchange economy but an exchange economy where the aim of production is to make a profit. Profit is the monetary expression of the difference between the exchange value of a product and the exchange value of the materials, energy and labour-power used to produce it, or what Marx called ‘surplus value.’ Defenders of capitalism never seem to ask the practical question about what the critical factor determining a production initiative in a market system.

The answer is obvious from everyday experience. The factor that critically decides the production of commodities is the judgement that enterprises make about whether they can be sold in the market. Obviously, consumers buy in the market that they perceive as being for their needs. But whether or not the transaction takes place is not decided by needs but by ability to pay. So the realisation of profit in the market determines both the production of goods and also the distribution of goods by various enterprises. In the market system the motive of production, the organisation of production, and the distribution of goods are inseparable parts of the same economic process: the realisation of profit and the accumulation of capital. The economic pressure on capital is that of accumulation, the alternative is bankruptcy. The production and distribution of goods is entirely subordinate to the pressure on capital to accumulate. The economic signals of the market are not signals to produce useful things. They signal the prospects of profit and capital accumulation. If there is a profit to be made then production will take place; if there is no prospect of profit, then production will not take place. Profit not need is the deciding factor. Under capitalism what appear to be production decisions are in fact decisions to go for profit in the market. The function of cost/pricing is to enable a business enterprise to calculate its costs, to fix its profit expectations within a structure of prices, to regulate income against expenditure and, ultimately, to regulate the exploitation of its workers. Unfortunately, prices can only reflect the wants of those who can afford to actually buy what economists call ‘effective demand’ – and not real demand for something from those without the wherewithal – the purchasing power – to buy the product (I may want a sirloin steak but I can only afford a hamburger.)

Socialist determination of needs begins with consumer needs and then flows throughout distribution and on to each required part of the structure of production. Socialism will make economically-unencumbered production decisions as a direct response to needs. With production for use, the starting point will be needs. By the replacement of exchange economy by common ownership basically what would happen is that wealth would cease to take the form of exchange value, so that all the expressions of this social relationship peculiar to an exchange economy, such as money and prices, would automatically disappear. In other words, goods would cease to have an economic value and would become simply physical objects which human beings could use to satisfy some want or other. (One reason why socialism holds a decisive productive advantage over capitalism is by eliminating the need to tie up vast quantities of resources and labour implicated in a system of monetary/pricing accounting.)

Humans are capable of integrating themselves into a stable ecosystem. and there is nothing whatsoever that prevents this being possible today on the basis of industrial technology and methods of production, all the more so, that renewable energies exist (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal and whatever) but, for the capitalists, these are a “cost” which penalises them in face of international competition. No agreement to limit the activities of the multinationals in their relentless quest for profits is possible. Measures in favour of the environment come up against the interests of enterprises and their shareholders because by increasing costs they decrease profits. No State is going to implement legislation which would penalise the competitiveness of its national enterprises in the face of foreign competition. States only take into account environmental questions if they can find an agreement at international level which will disadvantage none of them. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Competition for the appropriation of world profits is one of the bases of the present system. So it is not “Humans” but the capitalist economic system itself which is responsible for ecological problems and the capitalist class and their representatives, they themselves are subject to the laws of profit and competition.

Yes, socialism is a real alternative and the only viable means to achieve the steady state economy sought by so many.

(1) https://www.marxists.org/archive/pankhurst-sylvia/1923/socialism.htm
(2) http://www.amazon.com/Eco-Socialism-From-Ecology-Social-Justice/dp/0415097193

The Rise of the African-American Police State

Garikai Chengu

Black people in America live in a police-state-within-a-state. The African American police state exercises its authority over the Black minority through an oppressive array of modern day lynchings by the police, increasing for-profit mass incarceration and the government sanctioned surveillance and assassination of Black leaders. The African American police state is unquestionably a modern day crime against humanity.

The first modern police forces in America were Slave Patrols and Night Watches, which were both designed to control the behaviors of African Americans.

Historian Victor Kappeler notes that in 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first Slave Patrol. Historical literature is clear that prior to the Civil War a legally sanctioned police force existed for the sole purpose of oppressing the slave population and protecting the property and interests of white slave owners. The glaring similarities between the eighteenth century Slave Patrols and modern American police brutality in the Black community are too salient to dismiss or ignore.

America was founded as a slave holding republic and slaves did not take too kindly to being enslaved and they often rebelled, becoming enemy’s of the state. Slave Patrols were created in order to interrogate and persecute Blacks, who were out and about, without any due process or formal investigation. To this day, police do not serve and protect the Black community, they treat Blacks as inherently criminal and sub-human.

Ever since the first police forces were established in America, lynchings have been the linchpin of the African American police state.

The majority of Americans believe that lynchings are an outdated form of racial terrorism, which blighted American society up until the end of the era of Jim Crow laws; however, America’s proclivity towards the unbridled slaughter of African Americans has only worsened over time. The Guardian newspaper recently noted that historians believe that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on average two African-Americans were lynched every week.

Compare this with incomplete data compiled by the FBI that shows that a Black person is killed by a white police officer more than twice a week, and it’s clear that police brutality in Black communities is getting worse, not better.

Racial terrorism gave birth to America. It should come as no surprise that the state’s law enforcement agents routinely engage in the terrorism of modern day lynchings.

Traditional lynchings were not preceded by judge, jury or trial and were often for the most trivial of reasons such as talking to a white woman, failing to remove a hat or making a sarcastic grin. Modern day lynchings are also not preceded by due process. Numerous Black children like Tamir Rice have been slaughtered by police for trivialities like playing with a toy gun in public.

Lynching does not necessarily mean hanging. It often included humiliation, torture, burning, dismemberment and castration. A lynching was a quintessential American public ritual that often took place in front of large crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. Historian Mark Gado notes that, “onlookers sometimes fired rifles and handguns hundreds of times into the corpse while people cheered and children played during the festivities”.

Sensational American journalism, spared the public no detail no matter how horrible, and in 1899 the Springfield Weekly described a lynching by chronicling how, “the Negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and genital parts of his body. He pleaded pitifully for his life while the mutilation was going on…before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones crushed into small bits…the Negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver…small pieces of bones went for 25 cents…”. Such graphic accounts were the norm in the South, and photos, were regularly taken of the lynched bodies on display and made into postcards that were sent all over the country.

Nowadays, the broader American public participates in modern day lynchings by sharing videos that go viral of police officers slaying Black men, women and children. By opting not to censor the graphic content of police killing Blacks, today’s videos in the media serve the same purpose as the detailed written accounts of yesteryear by adding to the psychological suffering of the African American. Such viral graphic accounts also desensitize the white community to such an extent that empowers white policemen to do more.

A hallmark of twentieth century fascist police states, such as Italy under Mussolini or Franco’s Spain, is the lack of police accountability for their crimes. In spite of extremely egregious circumstances surrounding all lynchings and many police killings, police are rarely held liable.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee recently issued a report on human rights abuses in the United States which roundly condemned the epidemic of police brutality. It stated: “The Committee is concerned about the still high number of fatal shootings by police which has a disparate impact on African Americans”.

In modern America, the African American police state assassinates the Black victim twice. Once by way of lynching and again to assassinate the victim’s character so as to justify the public execution. All too often a Black victim’s school record, employment status and social media presence are dragged by the media into the court of public opinion, as if any of it has any baring on whether an agent of the state has the right to lynch a Black U.S. citizen.

Arbitrary arrest and mass incarceration have been quintessential elements of police states from East Germany to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile.

The United States right now incarcerates more African-Americans as a percentage than South Africa did at the height of Apartheid.

A Senate hearing on the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that the American prison population hovered around 25,000 throughout the 1900s, until the 1980’s when America suddenly experienced a massive increase in the inmate population to over a quarter million. The cause was Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs which intentionally, and disproportionately targeted Blacks. The War on Drugs is now the African America police state’s main propaganda justification for police brutality and judicial discrimination agains Blacks.

One out of three African American males will be arrested and go through the American injustice system at some point in their lives, primarily for nonviolent drug charges, despite studies revealing that white youth use drugs at higher rates than their Black counterparts.

For decades, the African-American crime rate has been falling but Black imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Aside from the War on Drugs, the rise in prison population may have another less publicized cause: gradual privatization of the prison industry, with its profits-over-justice motives. If the beds aren’t filled, states are required to pay the prison companies for the empty space, which means taxpayers are largely left to deal with the bill that might come from lower crime and imprisonment rates.

Private prisons were designed by the rich and for the rich. The for-profit prison system depends on imprisoning Blacks for its survival. Much in the same way the United States was designed.

After all, more Black men are in prison or jail, on probation or parole than were enslaved in 1850 before the Civil War began.

The history of Nazi Germany’s Gestapo has many parallels to what U.S. law enforcement in the Black community has become.

The infamous “stop-and-frisk” policies that allow the New York Police Department to stop you based on suspicion are Nazi-like. Latinos and Blacks make up 84 percent of all those stopped, although they make up respectively 29 and 23 percent of New York City’s population. Furthermore, statistics show that NYPD officers are far more likely to use physical force against Blacks and Latinos during stops.

The Gestapo operated without any judicial review by state imposed law, putting them above the law.

The FBI’s counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO) of the 1950’s, 60s, and 70s formed one of the most infamous domestic initiatives in U.S. history, targeting Black organizations and individuals whom the FBI saw as threatening the racist, capitalist status quo.

COINTELPRO was a series of covert, and often illegal, government projects aimed at surveying, infiltrating, discrediting, and brutalizing Black communities.

After COINTELPRO director William C. Sullivan concluded in a 1963 memo that Martin Luther King, Jr. was “the most dangerous Negro in the future of this nation,” he wrote: “it may be unrealistic to limit [our actions against King] to legalistic proofs that would stand up in court or before Congressional Committees.”

The FBI waged an intense war against Martin Luther King Jr. The African American police state’s law enforcement agents bugged his hotel rooms, tried to provoke IRS investigations against him, and harassed magazines that published articles about him. In 1999, a civil trial concluded that United States law enforcement agents were responsible for Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.

The perpetuation of the African American police state is a modern day crime against humanity. The ongoing protests and uprisings in Black communities are a direct and just response to centuries of worsening incarceration, modern day lynchings and systematic second class citizenship. Far from being a “post-racial” nation, American race relations are at a new low. Simmering discontent in Black communities will continue to rise towards a dangerous boiling point unless and until the African American police state is exposed and completely dismantled.

I Dare You President Obama

Ralph Nader

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

You have taken a strong across-the-board position favoring the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) nearing completion and scheduled for a fast track clearance vote in the Congress. Indeed, you have descended admirably from your presidential perch to take on the most informed critics of this agreement with Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

You have accused critics of spreading misinformation, including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Lori Wallach, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, who is known for her meticulous research and who was at Harvard Law School during your time there.

With the barrage of commentary on an agreement, labelled singularly as trade promotion by unknowing newspaper columnists and reporters, and the less reported rebuttals that the TPP is far more than a trade agreement (aka treaty) and places serious environmental, health, consumer and labor conditions within its grip, isn’t it time for you to engage with concerned citizens and their representatives rather than assert unilaterally that “Elizabeth Warren is wrong on the facts”? It is time to clarify the issues before a skeptical public and others who are downright confused. Why not debate Senator Elizabeth Warren before a national TV audience?

There are many reasons for you to use this format to engage the American people. They will be the ones paying the price in many dire ways if the mega-corporate promoters of TPP turn out to be as wrong as they have been with prior trade deals, most recently the Korean Trade Agreement (2012) which you espoused and which has worsened the trade deficit with South Korea and caused job loss in the United States.

Vice President Albert Gore debated NAFTA on nationwide television with Ross Perot.
You and Senator Warren have been teachers of the law and share a common law school background—Harvard. A debate would be deliberative and, assuming you and she have read the 29 chapters of the TPP (only a handful of chapters dealing with trade), would be revelatory far beyond the narrow prisms reflected in the mass media.
Like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, the TPP is a transnational system of autocratic governance that subordinates and bypasses our access to our own judiciary in favor of secret tribunals whose procedures contravene our country’s system of due process, openness and independent appeals. These agreements, as you know, have enforceable provisions regarding the rights and privileges of corporations. The rhetorical assurances regarding labor, environment and consumer rights have no such enforcement mechanisms.
Notwithstanding all the win-win claims of promoters of past trade agreements, our country’s trade deficit has continued to grow over the past 35 years. Enormous trade deficits mean job exports. Given this evidence, the public would be interested in listening to your explanation of this adverse experience to U.S. workers and our economy.
You believe Elizabeth Warren is wrong on the facts relating to the “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” provision of the TPP, which allows foreign companies to challenge our health, safety and other regulations, not in our courts but before an international panel of arbitrators. A perfect point/counterpoint for a debate process, no?
Over the years, it has been abundantly clear that very few lawmakers or presidents have actually read the text of these trade agreements involving excessive surrender of local, state and federal sovereignties. They have relied on memoranda prepared by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and corporate lobbies. Given the mass of fine print with portentous consequences for every American, a worthy debate topic is whether to put off submitting this trade pact so that copies can be made accessible to the American people to discuss and consider before going to Congress under very limited debate for an up or down vote without any amendments being permitted. Why the rush when the ink isn’t even dry on the page?
Some may wonder why you don’t call this agreement a “treaty”, like other countries. Could it be that an agreement only requires a 51 percent vote, rather than a two-thirds vote in the Congress for treaty ratification?

You are quoted in the Washington Post decrying “misinformation” circulating on the TPP and pledging that you are “going to be pushing back very hard if I keep on hearing that.” Fine. Push back before tens of millions of people with Senator Elizabeth Warren as your debating counterpart. If you agree, be sure that interested Americans have a copy of the TPP deal first so that they can be an informed audience.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely yours,

Ralph Nader

Lessons of The Tenderloin

Steve Early

When British sociologist Ruth Glass first coined the term “gentrification” in 1964, she was describing the process of displacement already underway in London as poor and working class people got forced out of their traditional urban neighborhoods due to an influx of higher-income renters and home-buyers. In the U.S., no city is more closely identified with this same trend than San Francisco, now one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.

Not long ago, San Francisco had many blue-collar neighborhoods, that were affordable and provided easy access to working class jobs. Now, as housing lawyer and community organizer Randy Shaw notes in his new book, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco (Urban Reality Press, 2015), much of the city is “virtually off-limits to all but well-heeled residents.” Since 1990, its black population has decreased by 44 percent—more than any other major U.S. city.

African-Americans, along with a growing number of Latinos employed in the service sector, have been pushed far beyond the city limits in search of housing they can afford.Some of these workers have to commute long distances back downtown, at great expense in time and money. Meanwhile, the city’s up and coming property owning class—rooted in the new white-collar wealth of Silicon Valley—is renovating their old homes and apartments in places like the Mission District, turning a longtime immigrant stronghold into the Bay Area’s hottest hipster haven.

As Al Jazeera reported in February, Facebook’s multi-billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg recently threw down $10 million in cash for a “pied-a-terre” in the Mission valued at $3.2; to give himself some elbow room, he then bought the house next door for $1 million above its asking price.

The only exception to this local displacement trend is a San Francisco neighborhood with a colorful 100-year history of naughtiness and non-conformism. It has been known, for most of that time, as “The Tenderloin”—a reference to the antique police practice of shaking down local restaurants and butcher shops by taking the best cuts of their beef in lieu of cash.

At various periods in its storied past, the Tenderloin has been home to famous brothels, Prohibition-era speakeasies, San Francisco’s first gay bars, well-known hotels and jazz clubs, film companies and recording studies, and professional boxing gyms. For the past 35 years, Shaw has worked there as co-founder of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC). After graduating from a law school located a few blocks away, he became involved in many of the neighborhood’s early fights for individual tenants rights. Among the crucial large-scale victories won by Tenderloin defenders was a pioneering “community benefits agreement” (CBA) with three powerful hotel chains.

As Shaw recounts in his book, Hilton, Holiday Inn, and Ramada wanted to build three luxury tourist hotels adjacent to the Tenderloin in the early 1980s. Given the city’s pro-development political climate—less prevalent then than now–the hospitality industry expected little organized opposition to its plans. The high-rise project originally proposed would, according to Shaw, have transformed the adjacent area by “driving up property values, leading to further development, and, ultimately its destruction as a low-income residential neighborhood.”

Community Organizing Case Study

Among those faced with the prospect of big rent increases and eventual evictions were many senior citizens, recently arrived Asian immigrants, and longtime residents of Single Room Occupancy (SRO) apartment buildings in dire need of better ownership and management. Fortunately, this low-income, multi-racial population included some residents with “previously unrecognized activist and leadership skills” that were put to good use by the full-time community organizers assisting their struggle. During a year-long campaign, they succeeded in mobilizing hundreds of people to pressure the city Planning Commission to modify the hoteliers’ plans. As Shaw reports, the resulting deal with City Hall created “a national precedent for cities requiring private developers to provide community benefits as a condition of approving their projects.”

“Each of the hotels contributed $320,000 per hotel per year for twenty years for low-cost housing development.“ They also had to sponsor a $4 million federal Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) for the acquisition and renovation of four low-cost Tenderloin SROs….Additionally, each hotel had to pay $200,000 for community service projects, and give priority in employment to Tenderloin residents.” 

Thirty years later, community benefits agreements of this sort are much more commonplace, if no less difficult to obtain. Where tax breaks or other forms of public assistance subsidize a major development project today, the value of negotiated community benefits—in the form of additional low income housing units, living wage jobs, local hiring, or preservation of open space for public use—can be far more lucrative.

In fact, the dozens of cities that have won community benefits agreements from developers in recent decades have already triggered their own big business backlash, in the form of proposed legislation in Michigan that would ban CBA’s. Not surprisingly this Republican initiative is directed at belated efforts by the city of Detroit to make land grants and tax breaks for developers come with a few more strings attached. But its corporate sponsors clearly hope that other states will also move to restrict municipal negotiation of binding agreements related to the local impact of hotel, casino, shopping center, office building, or luxury apartment construction.

Such “mitigation measures” in the Tenderloin were combined with later successful struggles over re-zoning and the Tenderloin Housing Clinic’s own acquisition and development of non-profit SRO buildings (which now house 1,600 of San Francisco’s most needy tenants). The result is what Shaw calls “an island of low-income and working class residents amidst a city of great wealth.”  He estimates that the Tenderloin today has “a higher percentage of housing in nonprofit hands than any central city neighborhood in the nation,” an arrangement which safeguards its distinctive character as  “an economically mixed neighborhood with thousands of low-income residents.”

“Nearly a quarter of the neighborhood’s buildings are non-profit owned, and many others are privately owned but with tenants’ rents subsidized by the federal government. Other buildings are off the speculative market because they are leased to non-profit groups whose tenants’ rents are stabilized by the city.”

As Shaw told a recent interviewer, “the story of most urban neighborhoods in the U.S. is that they either remain desperately poor, drug-dominated, and very unpleasant places to live or they become gentrified.” Like similar downtown areas elsewhere, the Tenderloin was long synonymous with drugs, crime, sub-standard housing, and terminal economic decline. Visitors to San Francisco were warned to stay away from the place. Now, as a result of four decades of successful community organizing around housing issues, this 31 square-block area has safer streets, more neighborhood oriented small businesses, pocket parks and art displays. Defying past stereotypes and current trends, it also has the highest percentage of children, among its residents, of any neighborhood in San Francisco.

Befitting a place that more people are now proud to call home, the Tenderloin will soon have its own local history museum (scheduled to open in June). This facility will help educate newer residents and out-of-town visitors about the Tenderloin’s colorful working class past—while also celebrating its current, all-too-unusual status as one of the nation’s “most racially and ethnically diverse communities.”

Of course, pride in any urban community doesn’t count for much if you can’t afford to live there anymore. For those resisting gentrification elsewhere—or fighting to insure that its benefits are more equitably shared—Shaw’s book will be an invaluable guide. It illustrates how persistent and creative grassroots organizing can challenge and change urban re-development schemes designed for the few, rather than the many. And, in many other cities, not just San Francisco, it’s the latter who continue to get pushed out and left behind in the name of neighborhood improvement.

The Logic of Rebellion

Austin McCoy

My eyes were glued to my television set as I watched civil unrest unfold in Baltimore. Yet, as a historian who has studied urban rebellions, I was not surprised. Since last August, the question for me has not been why, but when.

I watched CNN’s and MSNBC’s coverage. What I noticed was not surprising, but vexing, nonetheless. Commentators like Al Sharpton, Dr. Jamal Bryant, and others resorted to condemning and condescending participants and denying the uprising’s political significance. The assumption that violence is senseless and apolitical was embedded in their sanctimony.

Now, I do not aim to advocate for the use of collective violence, but I believe it is imperative that we analyze its political significance. In yesterday’s press conference, President Obama argued that the “riot” distracted us from the pursuit of reform. I argue otherwise, the Baltimore rebellion not only highlights the problem of policing, it opens a space for analysis and conversation of all of the structural problems that President Obama mentioned in his reactions yesterday. Rebellions historically have also created political opportunities for reform. Dismissing collective violence as senseless, criminal, and apolitical narrows our frame for understanding the history of interconnected problems plaguing cities and municipalities like Baltimore and Ferguson such as racial and economic segregation and redlining, deindustrialization, overpolicing, the emergence of mass incarceration, and even criminal activity. I argue that collective violence is protest politics. Violent protest does contain a logic, even if it appears chaotic.

The pressing question underlying live analyses of the Baltimore uprising was: Why do African Americans rebel?

The mainstream explanation: The Baltimore uprising was a product of criminal opportunism, youthful energy, boredom, and, mostly notably, family breakdown. These explanations allow for political officials and commentators to demonize rebels with racially coded language. Baltimore’s Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, and President Obama led the chorus of critics, calling violent protesters “lawless gangs…,”“thugs” and, “criminals.”

State officials demonize those who engage in violent protests for several reasons: to deter further participation, to maintain order, and to retain the state’s monopoly over “legitimate” collective violence. State actors (loosely defined here as those who work in the military, police, elected governance, or even social services) risk threatening America’s social order if they publicly validate the participation in collective violence of those who find themselves at the bottom of the nation’s social, economic, and racial hierarchy.

Maintaining the state’s control over who gets to participate in “legitimate” violence also explains local, state, and national political leaders’ desperation to untangle a historical relationship between violence, politics and protest, and social change. This is why political leaders were hyperventilating about how Baltimoreans need to be nonviolent and why violence does not constitute a form of protest. As Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently reasoned, appeals to nonviolence allow public officials to avoid accountability. Conjuring the mythical spirits of nonviolent protest in America’s recent past enables public officials and other Americans to evade discussions about the deep causes for rebellion. What is missing from analyses of the rhetoric of nonviolence is that these exhortations may serve as an implicit admission of the crisis of legitimacy that police departments, post-1970s municipal governments, and black elected officials are confronting in the wake of police killings and rising inequality. Mayor Rawlings-Blake, Governor Hagan, and President Obama cannot promise to employ all of the participants or to fully rebuild their neighborhoods. The only tools many executives have left are the police and, in the case of Baltimore, appeals to nonviolence.

Of course, the irony surrounding their efforts to appeal to nonviolent political change lay in denying this America’s history of political violence. Historian Paul Gilje argues “The United State of America was born amid a wave of rioting in his book, Rioting in America. He proceeds to point to the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party as prominent examples. I should expand that observation: The U.S. was founded in not just violent protest against persons and property, but also in plunder and looting — enslavement, land dispossession, and violent rebellion against the British Empire. We will always remember the Boston Tea Party fondly while we erase any traces of black and brown rebellion.

The problem with the mainstream view of rebellion is that it relies on pathological, behavioral, and individual explanations. These explanations are often superficial and they appear simple and commonsensical. Senator Rand Paul and potential presidential candidate, Ben Carson, for example, echo Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s explanation for black poverty. They point to weak parenting and the lack of “strong fathers” in black homes as the fundamental causes for participation. These analyses elide the persistence of structural racism, economic exploitation, and violent oppression in potentially rebellious spaces. Does this mean that there are not opportunists who seek to take advantage of the revolt? No. But focusing on “opportunists” undermines efforts to understand thoroughly the necessary and sufficient causes for rebellion. And, if we do not consider the conditions fully, we foreclose the chance of constructing just policies that could address structural racism, economic exploitation, police oppression, or even inner-city violence.

As a Master’s student, my advisor and I often discussed what constituted necessary and sufficient causes for urban rebellion. They are the key to comprehending the generation of insurgency. Necessary conditions are factors needed to generate discontent, frustration, and opportunity among potential rebels. Necessary causes are often simultaneously contemporaneous and historical in nature — residential segregation, the flight of industry and high paying jobs, decline in education system and social services, draining of tax base, gentrification, persistent racialized poverty, lack of adequate transportation, exploitation of local consumers, overpolicing, inner city violence and the emergence of underground economies. Of course, this does not make Ferguson and Baltimore identical. These developments affect particular areas differently. But, for social scientists especially, it is possible to identify the deadly mix of disinvestment, inequality, exploitation, and oppression that ignites rebellion.

Sufficient conditions constitute the spark for rebellion. And according to most social science literature and official reports, most rebellions stem from police brutality.

Enter Freddie Gray.

On April 12, Baltimore police approached, pursued, and arrested 25-year-old Freddie Gray for mostly unknown reasons. The police dragged him before placing him in the van. The police likely took him for a“rough ride” where officers would place suspects into vehicles unsecured with the intent to harm and subdue them. He sustained a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody. The department suspended the six officers involved. Yet, the authorities could not explained how Gray sustained his fatal injury. They have yet to provide an answer.

Gray’s killing reflects the continued degradation of black life. The spate of black deaths over the last several years animates troubling political trends such as conservatives’ assault on voting rights, welfare and other social services, and even the reproductive freedoms of women of color. Decades of job loss and disinvestment of social services have left black bodies vulnerable. Social rights often serve to protect one’s personal liberty. People of color who live in areas characterized by chronic poverty are subject to stigmatization and expulsion. What historian Khalil Gilbran Muhammad calls the condemnation of blackness justifies the killing and jailing of black and brown bodies. The absence of civil and economic rights and the presence of oppressive policing and surveillance leaves black and brown bodies vulnerable.

So people rebel.

Rebellions contain physical battles between police and protesters and rhetorical clashes in the media. Rebellions contain two offensives — one by the people, another by the authorities and elected officials. While we have not seen the type of militarized offensive akin to Ferguson, we watched as Rawlings-Blake, Hagan, and Batts launched a rhetorical offensive, referring to participants as thugs and criminals. Participants and allies continue to utilize social media to frame the unrest.

Living in the “Box”

While I have not been impressed with Dr. Jamal Bryant’s analysis of the rebellion, he offered a great metaphor for what it means to live as a black person in unequal cities during Gray’s funeral service:

“At 8:40, your son began running from the police. He began running. At 8:41, according to the timeline, he stopped. He stopped not because he was out of breath…He stopped because somewhere within the inner recesses of his own mind. He made up in his own mind ‘I’m tired of living in a box.’ And so he stopped running…”

Freddie Gray was not the only one who was frustrated with containment. I surmise that man black Baltimoreans revolted against this condition. This is why African Americans “burn down their own neighborhood.”

The question — Why are black people destroying their own communities? — implies irrationality on the part of violent protesters and the absence of logic of this form of collective action. There is a logic to rebellion. Participants often strike at symbols of authority and exploitation and spaces of consumption — police, liquor stores, and check-cashing establishments. Historian Gerald Horne reports how rebels in Watts burned credit receipts before ransacking particular stores in Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s. Two days ago, we watched scores of Baltimoreans rush a check cashing establishment. Even the looting of luxury goods is representative of America’s obsession with the possession of plenty.

I also argue that many of these spaces are not necessarily ones of community. Impoverished spaces often serve to contain undesirables. I may not agree with much of what Dr. Bryant says, but his “box” metaphor is apt. Prison authorities may put you in the box if they view you as a problem. So, think of it this way: If you were a prisoner, would you not burn down the cell and the whole jail if you had the chance? This may not be the case for all, but many certainly would.

The unfolding of urban rebellion generates further questions and observations about community. Are you a part of a community in the U.S. if you do not own any valuable property? What kind of community contains few affordable stores, few jobs, declining wages, and few social services in a consumer-based society? You need to be mobile, but you cannot get around. People are trapped. Now African Americans are confronted with the constant violation of personal liberty due to private and state surveillance, overpolicing, and the threat of death. Many live in a space that may be best described as a jail cell. This is the case even if one lives in the midst of vacant lots. The resident’s mobility remains restricted and their life chances remain low. And the police, of course, serve as guards to protect the haves from the have nots.

Someone living in Baltimore’s depressed areas may feel the historical weight of politicians, land developers, urban planners, real estate agents, business and corporate leaders manipulating law, space, wages, and policy for their benefit. Meanwhile a politician tells a Black Baltimorean to vote knowing that civil rights does not always ensure economic security. She watches police shoot and kill other black folks with little consequence. He wakes up every morning wondering whether or not they will be the next hashtag. Her march to protest Gray’s death does not garner attention while The Baltimore Sun plasters her friend’s face on the front page if the police suspects him of criminal activity.

Eventually the police kills a black person and then someone lights that spark — whether or not the person participates in criminal mischief is beside the point. We ignore the numerous studies illustrating how rebellions are the products of inequality and exploitation. In response to rebellion, many Americans seek to attack the rock thrower with the desperate hope of obscuring the underlying message — this country must finally reckon with its legacy of segregation, the effects of urban disinvestment, and the construction of a criminal justice system that“disappears” African American men and stigmatizes and violates black women and trans folks.

There is a logic to urban rebellion, but many of us remain unaware because of our lack of familiarity with the feeling and condition of entrapment. Of course, not everyone would respond to these circumstances the same way. If all we did, then either we would toil in poverty in perpetuity or we would have burned the country down to the ground a long time ago. All of us have to get to know that feeling and acquire a better sense of the history of racism and rebellion in this country before throwing our metaphorical stones. Rebellions are a product of a long train of abuses against the poor and people of color.

James Baldwin knew it. He warned us at the end of The Fire Next Time.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew it as well. Dr. King reflected upon his move to Chicago in 1966:

“Riots grow out of intolerable conditions. Violent revolts are generated by revolting conditions and there is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people who feel they have no stake in it, who feel they have nothing to lose. To the young victims of the slums, this society has so limited the alternatives of his life that the expression of his manhood is reduced to the ability to defend himself physically. No wonder it appears logical to him to strike out, resorting to violence against oppression.”

The Toxic Myth of Anzac

Eamonn McCann

Derry, Northern Ireland.

Scott McIntyre was sacked last week as a sports presenter on the Australian TV network Special Broadcasting Service for having tweeted acerbic comments about Anzac Day – the annual commemoration on April 25th of the role of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps at Gallipoli in 1915. “The cultification of an imperialist invasion of a foreign nation that Australia had no quarrel with is against all ideals of modern society,” was McIntyre’s opening salvo. Australians should rather be “Remembering the summary execution, widespread rape and theft committed by these ‘brave’ Anzacs.” The anger has been phenomenal. An online petition calling for McIntyre’s sacking attracted a reported 180,000 signatures in a day. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull denounced him as “despicable…difficult to think of more offensive or inappropriate comments.” Twenty four hours after the messages were sent, SBS announced that it had “taken decisive action to terminate Mr McIntyre’s position with immediate effect.” Anzac Day is of huge significance in Australia and New Zealand. Australia had become independent 13 years before the outbreak of the first world war, New Zealand six years later. The white section of the population regarded itself still as empire-loyalist, but now with this difference: that in joining the conflict as independent entities, they could see themselves as having taken their place among the nations of the world. I

The writer of “Waltzing Matilda”, Banjo Paterson, caught the note perfectly:

The mettle that a race can show
Is proved with shot and steel
And now we know what nations know
And feel what nations feel.

McIntyre had trashed the foundation myth. More generally, he had drawn attention to the way soft-lit Remembrance is used slyly to promote wars of the present and future. On a visit to New Zealand on the eve of Anzac Day, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot referred to soldiers fighting in the Middle East today as “Sons of Anzac.”

There are no exact parallels with Ireland’s experience, except in this: that the sentimentalisation of slaughter which McIntyre lost his job for exposing is evident, too,  in the memorialising of the Irish misled into following England’s flag. Like the Kiwis and the Aussies, they, too, were flung to their deaths like fistfuls of chaff.

The attack on Turkey was intended to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war and clear the path for Tsarist Russia through to Constantinople. In the longer term, it can be seen as the moment when Britain and France stepped decisively into the Middle East to replace the Ottomans as imperial rulers, then to draw the boundaries of invented nations, the better to divvy up the resources of the region between them. (A glance at today’s news pages will tell how that one worked out)

It is right and proper that all those killed in World War One should be remembered. But they should be remembered with rage against the obviously predictable futility of the enterprise and of the crime which it represented against humanity, not with reverence for a sacrifice well made.

How can it be that crowds gather today with heads bowed for the wilderness of victims but no show of anger against those responsible nor firm resolution of Never Again. How can there be commemorations of the ’14-’18 war which are not also anti-war demonstrations?

Herein, of course, lies the reason rouge is freshly applied every year to the skeletons of the fallen. In repose now, still beautiful, all worth it.

There is a positive size. After McIntyre had been battered for a couple of days, a different response began to emerge. A number of commentators spoke up, some to endorse what he’d said, others to defend his right to have said it. “It took four months for the defenders of free speech to move from #JeSuisCharlie to #SackScottMcIntyre” wrote one correspondent in the Sydney Morning Herald.

After apparent hesitation, the Australian journalists’ union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, came out strongly in McIntyre’s defence.

Perhaps some who are sick in their souls at the drenching of Ireland in toxic Remembrance will be encouraged to disrupt the displays of consensus.

In the 1970s, the Scots-Australian song-writer Eric Bogle adapted Banjo Paterson’s anthem:

“They gathered the crippled, the wounded, the maimed, and they shipped us back home to Australia/The legless, the armless, the blind, the insane, those proud wounded heroes of Suvla/And as our ship pulled into Circular Quay, I looked at the place where me legs used to be/And thanked Christ there was nobody waiting for me, to grieve, to mourn, and to pity./ And the band played Waltzing Matilda…”

Very many of us who have no time for the nationalist falsifications of the history of the Easter Rising are nevertheless content that it was far better to die ‘neath an Irish sky than at Suvla or Sedd el Bahr. We should be saying that out more  loudly.

Canada hikes military spending

Keith Jones

Canada’s Conservative government announced a major increase in military spending in last week’s federal budget.

Starting in 2017, base military spending will be increased by three percent, rather than the current two percent. This will result in an additional $11.8 billion in Canadian Armed Forces’ expenditures over a decade. As the increases are compounded, the military budget in 2026 will be a whopping $2.3 billion higher than hitherto budgeted.

Last week’s budget also announced $390 million in additional military spending in the current fiscal year, which began April 1. This is above and beyond the $18.941 billion in expenditures outlined in the spending estimates the Conservative government presented to parliament in early March.

Of this $390 million, fully $360 million is to fund the extension and expansion of Canada’s role in the new US-led war in the Middle East. At the end of March, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced the Canadian Armed Forces’ intervention in Iraq is being extended for a further 12 months, till April 2016, and that Canadian war planes will now bomb targets in Syria as well as Iraq.

According to Defence Minister Jason Kenney, by April 2016, Canada will have spent $520 million on waging war in Iraq and Syria.

The budget also gave the Canadian Armed Forces $7.1 million in additional money to fund the deployment of 200 military trainers to the Ukraine, where they will train forces loyal to the pro-western government that was installed in Kiev as a result of the US-engineered, fascist-spearheaded February 2014 coup.

The Conservatives’ latest military spending increases have elicited little comment from the corporate media. But significantly, what comment there has been has taken the government to task for doing too little, too late—that is for not dramatically raising spending so as to quickly reach NATO’s target of military expenditure equivalent to at least two percent of GDP.

The Ottawa Citizen, for example, published an article titled “Federal budget: Despite annual funding boost, defence faces uncertain times.” It cited a series of military analysts complaining that the Conservative increases are back-loaded to 2017 and are insufficient to counteract the cuts the government imposed as part of its drive to balance the budget, while continuing to lower taxes on big business and the rich. What the article conveniently omits is that these cuts were only levelled after the Conservatives, continuing on the trajectory of the Martin Liberal government, had hiked Canada’s military spending to the point that, in 2011, it was in real—i.e. inflation adjusted terms—the highest it had been since the end of the Second World War.

There is little doubt the Harper government views the military spending increases announced in its recent budget as a mere down-payment. On its drawing boards are massive plans for rearmament, including the purchase of a new generation of jet-fighters, most likely the US F-35, and a whole fleet of war ships. But, with an election slated for this October, the government found itself boxed in by the combination of a rapidly deteriorating economic situation—which compelled it to resort to all sorts of accounting tricks and improvised one-time measures to fulfill its long-touted deficit elimination pledge—and popular opposition to the Canadian elite’s aggressive militarist agenda.

Last September, when Harper was questioned by reporters about the discrepancy between his push for NATO to ratchet up pressure on Russia and his soft-peddling of its call for member states to pledge two percent of GDP on military expenditures, the prime minister frankly admitted that the Canadian people would not “understand” such a dramatic hike in military spending.

The opposition parties have said even less than the media about the government’s plans to divert still more resources to the military, even as it ravages public and social services. This silence bespeaks their consent and support.

The entire political elite—from the Conservatives to the trade union-based NDP and the pro-Quebec independence Parti Quebecois and Bloc Quebecois—has supported the reorientation of Canada’s foreign policy since the turn of the century. This reorientation has seen Canada play a leading role in a series of US-led wars and military interventions, including the 1999 NATO war on Yugoslavia, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the 2004 ouster of Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the 2011 NATO war “for regime” change in Libya.

The role of the NDP, which as late as 2003 still claimed to oppose Canada’s participation in NATO, has been especially significant. Time and again it has given its imprimatur to the attempts of the Canadian elite and its US partners to cloak their predatory actions in claims of humanitarian intervention and the “responsibility to protect.”

The claim that Canada, a major belligerent in both world wars of the last century, was a “peacekeeper” nation was always a fraud. It was part of an effort to promote a “left” Canadian nationalism during the 1950s and 1970s, the better to politically tame the working class. Throughout the Cold War, Canada was a staunch US military ally, a founder-member of NATO and its partner in NORAD. For close to half-a-century, Canada’s military resources were overwhelmingly devoted to planning for World War III with the Soviet Union. Such UN peace-keeping operations Canada led or joined were, it should be added, always mounted with Washington’s approval and support.

That said, Canada’s ruling class is eagerly participating in a resurgence of imperialism. Led by the US, the major capitalist powers have revived war as an instrument of policy, are rearming, and routinely trammel on international law and state sovereignty.

In keeping with Canada’s new aggressive foreign policy, the ruling elite has put paid to the notion of Canada as a “peacekeeper.” The media celebrates Canada’s military prowess in past and current combat, while Harper routinely proclaims Canada a “warrior nation.”

Whilst the Canadian Armed Forces did not wage war for four decades, stretching from the end of the Korean War till its participation in the 1991 Gulf War, it has been almost perpetually at war in this century, in Afghanistan (2001-2011), Libya (2011), and since last fall in Iraq and now Syria.

Furthermore, Canada is deeply involved in all three of the major military-strategic offensives the US is mounting on the world stage.

#It has joined the war against the Islamic State—a war that arises out of the series of wars the US has waged in the Middle East and has the same objective as they did, to secure US hegemony in the world’s most important oil-exporting region.

#Canada has long assisted the US in its effort to transform Ukraine into a western satellite and its drive to expand NATO to Russia’s borders. With the full support of the opposition parties, the Harper government has deployed Canadian warplanes to Eastern Europe and battleships to the Black Sea so as to bolster NATO’s threats against Russia.

#In 2013, Canada signed a secret military agreement with the US integrating Canada into the “Pivot to Asia,” Washington’s drive to strategically encircle and isolate China. It is also participating in the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), through which Washington aims to establish a vast US-led economic bloc at China’s expense.

Canada’s Communication Security Establishment (CSE), it should be added, is one of the key partners of the US National Security Agency. The CSE is an integral part of both components of the NSA’s global operations: spying on the world’s governments and citizens, and assisting the Pentagon and CIA in waging war and eliminating “security threats.”

Like the US ruling class, Canada’s is rattled by the decline in the relative economic power of the US, its long-time strategic and economic partner, and the rise of new powers. It calculates it can best defend and assert its own predatory and increasingly significant economic and strategic global interests by supporting US imperialism in its drive to shore up its world position through the deployment of its military might, the one area where the US continues to enjoy massive superiority over all its rivals.

Imperialist aggression abroad goes hand in hand with the Canadian bourgeoisie’s ever-widening assault on the democratic and social rights of the working class at home—the criminalization of strikes, the expansion of the national-security apparatus and the systematic dismantling of public and social services.

Only through the systematic mobilization of the international working class on a socialist program against war, social inequality and in defence of worker and democratic rights can this imperialist resurgence and social counter-revolution be countered, and crisis-ridden capitalism prevented from sucking humanity down the vortex of escalating military conflict leading ultimately to global conflagration.

European Union steps up repressive measures against refugees

Martin Kreickenbaum

A special summit of European heads of state and government held in Brussels on April 23 agreed a packet of measures to further repel the flow of refugees. The meeting was in response to the disasters in the Mediterranean, where within a week at least 1,200 refugees were drowned. The implementation of the decisions began immediately following the summit.

The European Commission is due to present a roadmap later this week for the period up to June. At the diplomatic level, Federica Mogherini, the EU foreign policy chief, has begun to call for a European military intervention in Libya.

Since the detection and destruction of smugglers’ boats off the Libyan coast, as decided by the summit, runs contrary to international law, Mogherini tried to gain support in the Security Council this week for a resolution agreeing to military intervention in North Africa. She also met with US Secretary of State John Kerry to agree further action.

French President François Hollande has said he would introduce a resolution in the Security Council authorizing the destruction of ships by military means, and would talk about it with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Hollande and Putin met the day after the EU summit in Yerevan, at the commemoration of the massacre of Armenians a century ago.

Since the approval of the Russian and Chinese governments is uncertain regarding a UN Security Council resolution, Mogherini is working on several fronts. In addition to a Security Council resolution, a request by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to the EU would also be an option. It was in this way that the Atalanta mission was legitimized by the United Nations in 2008, through which European warships hunt down pirate boats off the Horn of Africa.

On Monday, Mogherini and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi met with Ban Ki-moon on the helicopter carrier San Giusto off Sicily to demonstrate to him the need for military intervention.

But the UN general secretary seemed unimpressed. Ban described the Mediterranean as a “sea of tears and misery”, but did not support the planned hunt for smugglers’ boats. “The destruction of boats is not an appropriate measure. There is no military solution to the tragedy in the Mediterranean,” he told the newspaper La Stampa.

If the efforts at the UN fail, a third option remains for Mogherini. “If the UN approach doesn’t work, we need to find something else,” an EU diplomat told online magazine Euobserver. “All it takes is a little time.”

This refers to direct collaboration with the Libyan government. Such action is difficult, however, as the country is beset by feuding among two rival governments and dozens of militias following the NATO military intervention. The EU is therefore seeking to install a compliant national unity government that will give the green light for a military intervention.

The Libyan Dawn government in Tripoli, which is not recognized by the EU, announced that it would take any military intervention to destroy boats as a declaration of war and would not tolerate it. Even General Khalifa Haftar, the army chief from the government in Tobruk, recognized by the EU, told US cable network CNN last weekend that he would “never cooperate” with an EU military operation. This would be an “unwise decision”, he said, as “legitimate Libyan representation” had “not been consulted”.

The “international police operation” plan, as Matteo Renzi likes to call it, to deploy warships on the Libyan coast carries the risk of a bloody colonial war.

The militarization of the anti-refugee measures of the European Union does not stop at the Libyan coast. The EU summit has significantly extended the 10-point plan prepared earlier by the interior and foreign ministers.

Under the heading “Preventing irregular migration flows”, it says the EU is pledged “among other things, to step up support for Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Mali and Niger in monitoring and controlling their land borders”. According to the plan, this should be done using the existing European military operations in the region. European soldiers should therefore intercept migrants in the interior of Africa. The mass deaths of refugees are being exploited to pursue geo-strategic objectives.

Two employees of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik think tank underlined this in an article for Zeit Online, which also calls for an intervention in Syria. It was a humanitarian imperative that the EU and its member states “do not shy away from also intervening in conflicts, such as in Syria”, they write. “A military operation in the Mediterranean may reduce migratory pressure on the EU’s external borders. However, only a comprehensive foreign policy commitment in Europe can help refugees.”

In Africa, the EU is also planning the construction of detention centres for refugees. The Italian government has already begun this in Niger, an important transit country on the way to the Mediterranean coast. Who gets the opportunity to travel on to Europe will be determined at the camps. For all others there is just a return ticket to their country of origin.

Another camp is planned in Tunisia, where in 2012, with UNHCR support, a camp was built near Choucha for several thousand refugees who were stranded there for more than 18 months under inhumane conditions, without adequate food and sanitation. The German government finally accepted 195 migrants, while the rest were left to fend for themselves.

Such detention camps are now supported by the German government’s immigration commissioner, Aydan Özuguz (Social Democratic Party), who cynically praised the camps as “welcome centres” in North Africa.

In order to make the measures to repel refugees more effective locally, the European Union wants to send more “liaison officers” to North Africa in the future. “Liaison officers” is a code word for direct police and intelligence collaboration. The European Union pays its neighbouring countries hundreds of millions of euros for the construction of prisons and simultaneously takes on the training and supervision of the local security forces. For example, thousands of refugees sit in prisons in Libya that have been funded by the EU. It is no different in Ukraine and Tunisia.

The collaboration of the European border agency Frontex with the Moroccan and Spanish security forces on the border of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla is particularly brutal. Refugees who try to get over the metres-high fences bristling with razor sharp blades are beaten by thugs. Illegal refugee camps are regularly bulldozed and the few belongings of the refugees burned.

The decision adopted by the EU summit tripling the resources for the Triton and Poseidon missions is not about rescuing refugees, but stopping them getting anywhere near Europe. Both missions will continue to work under the mandate of Frontex. They do not actively look for ships in distress and have no means of saving hundreds of refugees. Rescue measures are still left to merchant ships, which are not equipped to carry them out.

An initial list of resources EU members are providing for Frontex includes thermal imaging surveillance vehicles, liaison officers, coast guard boats, helicopters, surveillance aircraft and warships—all means of stopping refugees coming, not rescuing them.

Secretly, the EU summit also dropped the decision to take on 5,000 refugees as part of a resettlement programme. There was no readiness to accept even this ridiculously small number.

At the same time, the EU is further sealing off its land borders in Southeast Europe. In Bulgaria, the existing 33 kilometre-long border fence will be extended by 82 kilometres. Cameras that see up to 15 kilometres deep into Turkish territory can already register every move. Bulgarian border guards act with extreme ruthlessness against refugees. In early March, Iraqi refugees were mistreated so badly that they died shortly afterwards from hypothermia.

Collaboration with Turkey, which currently hosts more than 1.8 million refugees from Syria and Iraq, will be expanded, according to the EU leaders. The country should prevent refugees coming to Europe, they said, even though the conditions in the Turkish refugee camps are intolerable.

Anger mounts among Greek retirees as Syriza threatens to withhold pensions

Kumaran Ira

Anger is rising among two million Greek pensioners who fear they will lose their pensions, as the Syriza-led government faces a cash crunch before making a €700 million payment to the IMF on May 12.

On Thursday, pension recipients, almost one fifth of Greek’s 11 million population, waited at branches of the National Bank of Greece, which pays most of the pension money, after the Greek state delayed pension payments due to a cash shortfall last week.

Pensioners reportedly broke into a board meeting of the state pension fund, demanding that it stop transferring its cash reserves to the government under an emergency law recently passed by Syriza.

While preparing sweeping social cuts, Syriza is also looting money from public entities that fund key social services as it negotiates the next tranche of €7.2 billion in loans from Greece’s eurozone partners. Recently, the government ordered 1,500 state entities, including pension funds, local authorities, hospitals and universities, to hand over their cash reserves to the central bank in order to pay off the EU.

The Financial Times of London cited 75-year-old former civil servant Sotiria Zlatini: “Normally I only withdraw half the money at the end of the month, but today I’m taking it all. There are so many rumours going round because of the government’s problems and what happened two days ago.”

Socrates Kambitoglou, a retired civil engineer, said, “I went to the ATM in the morning before going to the supermarket, but the money wasn’t there. … I went back at eight in the evening feeling quite anxious, but it had arrived.”

The government claimed the delay in the pension payment was only due to a “technical hitch.” Deputy Minister for Social Security Dimitris Stratoulis said a technical problem with the interbank payment system had caused the delay.

An anonymous official familiar with the Greek state’s cash position refuted claims that a technical problem caused the delay. He told the Financial Timesthat the payments were held up because the state pension funds “were still missing several hundred million euros on Tuesday morning”.

The looting of Greek pension funds is an indictment of the pseudo-left Syriza party, which came to power in January, falsely claiming it would end austerity. After winning the January 25 election, Syriza capitulated to the EU’s austerity agenda and pledged to work closely with the EU to impose new attacks on the working class.

While cutting pension and public sector wages, Syriza is pushing ahead with privatization of ports, including the main port in the Athens region, Piraeus, and 14 regional airports. Before coming to power, Syriza claimed that it would oppose privatizations.

Yesterday, Bloomberg cited anonymous sources to report: “The Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund, which sells real estate, infrastructure and other government holdings, will send on Wednesday a revised tender offer to investors, including China Cosco Holding Co., to solicit bids for a stake in the Piraeus Port Authority SA.”

According to these sources, “The fund is satisfied with an offer of €1.2 billion ($1.4 billion) for the lease of 14 regional airports in Greece from Germany’s Fraport AG, and expects to conclude the sale within a month.”

On Thursday, markets stepped up pressure on the Greek state to intensify austerity and structural reforms. On Wednesday, Moody’s Investors Service downgraded ratings on Greek bonds further into junk status, from CAA1 to CAA2, assigning the rating a negative outlook.

Moody warned that should negotiations with the EU fail, “the outcome is likely to be a disorganised default”.

This occurs as Syriza begins talks with the IMF and EU on the bailout deals. To obtain a further €7.2 billion loan from the troika—the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund—Syriza is preparing to propose detailed social cuts, including to pensions and health care, and structural reforms. These reforms include reactionary changes to labour laws, layoffs in the public sector, and the privatisation of state-owned companies.

“The Greek government is ready to accept an honest solution with its creditors that will allow financial aid to be unblocked, and to end the financial asphyxia caused by the memoranda,” Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis told radio station Sto Kokkino.

After the failure of previous talks with the troika to strike a bailout deal, Tsipras appointed a new Greek negotiator team, replacing Varoufakis with Deputy Foreign Minister Euclid Tsakalotos.

Tsakalotos made clear that Syriza hopes to implement policies dictated by the EU. “When you have a political plan, you can find solutions and make some compromises,” he said.

As the ongoing looting of pension funds shows, such compromises would signify Syriza and the EU working together to rob the working masses.